When you rest in God, you just go home to yourself like the wave on the water. If the wave continues to search, she will never find the water. The only way to find the water is to go home to herself. When she realizes that she is water, she has peace. She practices resting in God in the here and the now. Although she continues to rise and fall, she is peaceful. We can practice Love as the ground of our being: Home.
The best chance to be whole
is to love whatever gets in the way,
until it ceases to be an obstacle.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
Our lives are a mystery of growth from weakness to weakness, from the weakness of the little baby to the weakness of the aged. Throughout our lives we are prone to fatigue, sickness and accidents. Weakness is at the heart of each one of us. Weakness becomes a place of chaos and confusion, if in our weakness we are not wanted; it becomes a place of peace and joy, if we are accepted, listened to, appreciated and loved.
Some people are infuriated by weakness. Weakness awakens hardness and anger in them. But to deny weakness as part of life is to deny death, because weakness speaks to us of the ultimate powerlessness, of death itself. To be small, to be sick, to be dying, are stages of powerless, they appear to us to be anti-life and so we deny them. If we deny our weakness and the reality of death, if we want to be powerful and strong always, we deny part of our being, we live an illusion. To be human is to accept who we are, this mixture of strength and weakness.
Jean Vanier, Becoming Human
Gratitude welcomes what we are given. It doesn’t know any stories about how it should have been. To talk about gratitude is also to talk about what prevents gratitude, about resentment and bitterness. Resentment and bitterness are the residue that comes from dashed expectations. Since the world doesn’t fit our stories, there is a tension where I expected life to be more favorable to my hopes than it has been, or feel that the world has not bothered enough with me. That bitterness sticks in the body and the mind, so that the mind reruns its painful stories and the body stores them in awkwardness and discomfort.
John Tarrant, Practices of Gratitude.
We have not been raised to cultivate a sense of Mystery. We may even see the unknown as an insult to our competence, a personal failing. Seen this way, the unknown becomes a challenge to action. But Mystery does not require action; Mystery requires our attention. Mystery requires that we listen and become open. When we meet with the unknown in this way, we can be touched by a wisdom that can transform our lives.
Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather’s Blessings
Sometimes people think that when they meditate there should be no thoughts and emotions at all; and when thoughts and emotions do arise, they become annoyed and exasperated with themselves and think that they have failed. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a Tibetan saying: ‘It’s a tall order to ask for meat without bones, and tea without leaves.” So long as you have a mind, there will be thoughts and emotions.
Just as the ocean has waves, or the sun has rays, so the mind’s own radiance is its thoughts and emotions. The ocean has waves, yet the ocean is not particularly disturbed by them. The waves are the very nature of the ocean. Waves will rise, but where do they go? Back into the ocean. And where do waves come from? The ocean. In the same manner, thoughts and emotions are the radiance and expression of the very nature of the mind. They rise from the mind, but where do they dissolve? Back into the mind. Whatever arises, do not see it as a particular problem. If you do not impulsively react, if you are only patient, it will once again settle into its essential nature.
Sogdal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
