What a gift when we can finally make peace with ourselves.
It is time to apply some self-acceptance whenever we find ourselves trying to impress others, wondering whether we’re good enough, or trying too hard to say the right thing.
Melody Beattie
The mind can be free only when it is completely still. Though it has problems, innumerable urges, conflicts, ambitions, if — through self-knowledge, through watching itself without acceptance or condemnation — the mind is choicelessly aware of its own process, then out of that awareness there comes an astonishing silence, a quietness of the mind in which there is no movement of any kind.
It is only then that the mind is free because it is no longer desiring anything; it is no longer seeking; it is no longer pursuing a goal, an ideal—which are all the projections of a conditioned mind.
Jiddu Krishnamurti, As one is
If you remember nothing else, always remember this one great secret: we don’t have to feel any particular way. We don’t have to have special experiences, nor do we have to be any particular way. With whatever arises, whether it’s pleasing or not, try to remember that all we can do is experience and work with whatever our life is right now. No matter what life is and no matter how we feel about it, all that matters in practice is whether we can honestly acknowledge what is going on, and then stay present with the physical experience of that moment.
Ezra Bayda, Zen Heart
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.
Jane Hirshfield, The Weighing
As said before, the period of the pandemic can become a moment of reflection, where we come to know who we are and what we are our most important values. The challenge is, can we mindfully commit to living the rest of our lives from this place of truth?
Society … was regarded (by the Desert Fathers) as the shipwreck from which each single individual man had to swim for his life … These were men who believed that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets and values of what they knew as society, was purely and simply a disaster.
Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart
The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world.
The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure, instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.
Marilynne Robinson
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