Life is difficult, the Buddha taught, for everyone. Suffering, he said, is the demand that experience be different than what it is. Of course, we do what we can to address pain. Sometimes illnesses are cured. Sometimes relationships are mended. Sometimes losses are recouped. Sometimes, though, nothing can be done. The Buddha’s teaching of liberation was that peace of mind is possible, no matter what the circumstances.
Sylvia Boorstein, It’s All Happening to All of us, All of the Time
To acknowledge and cross a new threshold is always a challenge.
Though we know one another’s names and recognize one another’s faces, we never know what destiny shapes each life. The script of individual destiny is secret; it is hidden behind and beneath the sequence of happenings that is continually unfolding for us. Each life is a mystery that is never finally available to the minds light or questions.
That we are here is a huge affirmation; somehow life needed us and wanted us to be. To sense and trust this primeval acceptance can open a vast spring of trust within the heart. It opens up our lives to become voyages of discovery, creativity, and compassion.
No threshold need be a threat, but rather an invitation and a promise. Whatever comes, the great sacrament of life will remain faithful to us, blessing us always with visible signs of invisible grace. We merely need to trust.
John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between us.
Let everything happen to you.
Beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final .
Rilke
The Tibetan term bardo, or “intermediate state,” is not just a reference to the afterlife. It also refers more generally to these moments when gaps appear, interrupting the continuity that we otherwise project onto our lives….we sometimes refer to this as having the rug pulled out from under us, or feeling un-grounded. These interruptions in our normal sense of certainty are what is being referred to by the term bardo.
But to be precise, bardo refers to that state in which we have lost our old reality and it is no longer available to us….In those moments, we lose our grip on the old reality and yet have no sense what a new one might be like. There is no ground, no certainty, and no reference point — there is, in a sense, no rest. This has always been the entry point in our lives for religion, because in that radical state of unreality we need profound reasoning — not just logic, but something beyond logic, something that speaks to us in a timeless, non-conceptual way. Milarepa referred to this disruption as a great marvel, singing from his cave, “The precious pot containing my riches becomes my teacher in the very moment it breaks.”
Pema Khnsdro Rinpoche, Breaking Open in the Bardo
The lives of all beings are marked by three characteristics: impermanence, egolessness and suffering or dissatisfaction. Recognizing these qualities to be real and true in our experience helps us relax with things as they are. The first mark is impermanence. That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and changing, is the first mark of existence. We dont have to be mystics or physicists to know this. Yet at the level of personal experience, we resist this basic fact. It means that life is not always going to go our way. It means there’s loss as well as gain. and we don’t like that.
Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty
These T-shirts we fold into
perfect white squares
These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips
This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl
This bed whose covers I straighten
smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket
and nothing hangs out
This envelope I address
so the name balances like a cloud
in the center of sky
This page I type and retype
This table I dust till the scarred wood shines
This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again
like flags we share, a country so close
no one needs to name it
The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world
Naomi Shihab Nye, Daily
Mindfulbalance 