Life will bring you pain all by itself.
Your responsibility is to create joy
Milton Erikson, American Psychologist,
Year: 2017
Challenges and struggles
One of the most toxic new-age ideas is that we should “keep a positive attitude.” What a crazy, crazy idea that is. It is much healthier, much more healing, to allow yourself to feel whatever is coming up in you, and allow yourself to work with that anxiety, depression, grief. Because, underneath that, if you allow those feelings to come up and express themselves, then you can find the truly positive way of living in relationship to those feelings. That’s such an important thing…..It’s not about some “spiritual experience” of being high all the time. Not at all. It is about living with the ongoing stresses and strains and difficulties – and joys – of life, but doing so in a way that we feel whole. Living in relationship with the struggles of life is what makes us human.
Michael Lerner, The Difference between Healing and Curing
Stop, look, Go
This idea of listening and really looking and beholding, that comes in when people ask well, how shall we practice this gratefulness?
There is a very simple kind of methodology to it: stop, look, go. Most of us caught up in schedules and deadlines, and rushing around. And so the first thing is that we have to stop, because otherwise we are not really coming into this place of moment at all. And we can’t even appreciate the opportunity that is given to us because we rush by and it rushes by. So stopping is the first thing. But that doesn’t have to be long. When you are in practice, a split second is enough to stop. And then you look. What is now the opportunity of this given moment? Only this moment, and the unique opportunity this moment gives. And that is where this beholding comes in.
David Steindal Rast osb
Pause
Taking our hands off the controls and pausing is an opportunity to clearly see the wants and fears that are driving us. During the moments of a pause, we become conscious of how the feeling that something is missing or wrong keeps us leaning into the future, on our way somewhere else. This gives us a fundamental choice in how we respond: We can continue our futile attempts at managing our experience, or we can meet our vulnerability with the wisdom of radical acceptance.
Tara Brach, The Sacred Pause
Sunday Quote: The truth deep down
Your up and down emotions are like clouds in the sky;
beyond them, the real, basic human nature is clear and pure.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche
Fields that nourish the soul
A lot of our weekday work is centered on our achievements and that can become the narrow focus of our lives. But it is the heart that gives life and what nourishes us in the deepest sense. So our busy lives need to be interrupted by times when we revisit the heart and simply walk in wider fields.
Be kind
to your sleeping heart.
Take it out
into the vast fields
of Light
And let it
breathe.
Hafiz
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