Remember that we are learning to pay attention without self-judgment or discursive analysis. You might say that we are “rolling out the red carpet,” welcoming — beyond liking or disliking — whatever enters the field of the heart. Offering ourselves such close and caring attention is itself liberating.
Saki Santorelli, Heal Thy Self
Once you know that there is something other than what you have bitten into most of the time, your choices take on a new kind of karmic significance… This process slowly tunes you back into the harmony of things. It’s like, if you’re driving to school and you are in a hurry and the traffic becomes a terrible opposition to you, you struggle to move faster and faster. But you could take a breath and say, ‘Well, I’m in traffic; when I get to school, I’ll get to school; I am doing the best that I can, but it is also about this moment.’ You open yourself up to the flow and accept that there is a certain rate at which the traffic moves.
Ram Dass
For the witness, everything is workable. Nothing needs to be pushed away. To the contrary: our seemingly most intractable neuroses become the doorway into full life. What emerges when we open this door is a happiness that is not the opposite of sadness, a self-love that is not the opposite of self-hate. It is, rather, a happiness that embraces sadness, and a love that embraces hate. Witness consciousness cultivates a place behind dark and light, behind good and evil — behind even personality, behind even the mind. . . .
“As Rumi says, ‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. Meet me there.
Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self
Failure seldom stops you;
what stops you is the fear of failure
Jack Lemmon
Jesus of the dramatic word, from you we sometimes hear dystopia
of suns and moons and clouds and skies all falling
And we miss the small words of love that can sustain us through the winter
In the dramas of our news cycles
help us all – parishioners, preachers and politicians –
to enact love in the corners, queues and questions of our day
and in so doing discover you,
hiding in the corner, reaching out,
as you always did, creating community
Padraig O’Tuama, Advent Prayer
Basically, all emotions are modifications of one primordial, undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the loss of awareness of who you are, beyond name and form. Because of its undifferentiated nature, it is hard to find a name that precisely describes this emotion. ‘Fear’ comes close, but apart from a continuous sense of threat, it also includes a deep sense of abandonment and incompleteness. It may be best to use a term that is as undifferentiated as that basic emotion and simply call it ‘pain.’
One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove that emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain. You will not be free of that pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from identification with the mind, which is to say from ego. The mind is then toppled from its place of power and Being reveals itself as your true nature.
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
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