Category: Be fully present

When faced with the suffering of life: let go

Karl Duffy2 Comments

 

Some days we are faced with reminded of the disappointing nature of our life or work situation and we are left with a sense of frustration.  These daily sufferings are part of the fundamental, unsatisfactory, nature of life itself which we work with in meditation:

The third noble truth says that the cessation of suffering is letting go of holding on to ourselves. By “cessation” we mean the cessation of hell as opposed to just weather, the cessation of this resistance, this resentment, this feeling of being completely trapped and caught, trying to maintain huge ME at any cost. The teachings about recognizing egolessness sound quite abstract, but the path quality of that, the magic instruction that we have all received, the golden key is that part of the meditation technique where you recognize what’s happening with you and you say to yourself, “Thinking.” Then you let go of all the talking and the fabrication and discussion, and you’re left just sitting with the weather — the quality and the energy of the weather itself. Maybe you still have that quaky feeling or that churning feeling or that exploding feeling or that calm feeling or that dull feeling, as if you’d just been buried in the earth. You’re left with that. That’s the key: come to know that. 

Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape: And the Path of Loving-Kindness

When faced with setbacks

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To give ourselves compassion, we first have to recognize that we are suffering. We can’t heal what we can’t feel. We certainly feel the sting of falling short of our ideals, but our mind tends to focus on the failure itself, rather than the pain caused by failure. This is a crucial difference. The moment we see something about ourselves we don’t like, our attention tends to be absorbed by our perceived flaws.  In that moment, we don’t have the perspective needed to recognize the suffering caused by our feelings of imperfection, let alone to respond with compassion. We need to stop for a breath or two and acknowledge that we’re having a hard time, and that our pain is deserving of kind, caring response. 

Kristin Neff

 

It is in front of you

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Frequently on Mondays we wish we were somewhere else. We have difficulty realizing that the only moment for us to be alive is this one. We wish our lives away,  and they pass us by without us having seen the opportunity that lay in front of us.

All of our listening brings us home.  This is what the teacher-soul keeps saying to the student-self in each of us: To accept our place in the miracle before us, to listen to our experience, to our bodies, to our pain, to our wonder, to our place in the mystery, until we land and sing – this is what all birdsong calls us to remember. Try as we will to fly away, all flight leads us to land where we began, different but the same.  Try as we will to get out of here, life simply and harshly returns us to the heart of here, which, if listened to, opens us to the heart of everything. What the teacher says to the student who complains is that there is no lesson plan for living but to live. And all our dreams and plans and strategies are necessary detours to the brilliant reality of the life we already inhabit.  

Mark Nepo

The invisible world

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There’s no inner landscape in the invisible world of our souls and hearts but is full of the most melodious and nourishing and wild freedom.  And everyone should go there, to the wild place, where there are no cages, where there are not tight rooms without windows and without doors.  Everyone should go to the free clearance places in their own hearts

John O’Donohue

Looking to something else

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When we find our life unpleasant or unfulfilling, we try to escape the unpleasantness by various subtle escape mechanisms. In such attempts we are dealing with our lives as if there’s me and then there’s life outside me. As long as we approach our lives in this way we will bend all of our efforts to finding something or somebody else to handle our lives for us. We may look for a lover, a teacher, a religion, a center — something, or somebody, somewhere, to handle our difficulties for us.  As long as we see our lives in this dualistic fashion we fool ourselves and believe that we need not pay any price for a realized life.

Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen

Be here now

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Healing depends on listening with the inner ear – stopping the incessant blather, and listening. Fear keeps us chattering – fear that wells up from the past, fear of blurting out what we really fear, fear of future repercussions. It is our very fear of the future that distorts the now  that could lead to a different future if we dared to be whole in the present.

Marion Woodman, Jungian Analyst