We often find ourselves relating to people or to events through patterns inherited from our past and these prevent us from being fully open to the actual experience in front of us:
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand,
nor look through the eyes of the dead,
nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Everyone should sit firmly anchored in the place
where there is no better and worse.
Kodo Sawaki, 1880 – 1965, Japanese Sōtō Zen teacher
The Real …expects nothing of speech
Le réel …n’attend rien de la parole.
Jacques Lacan, French Psychoanalyst, Ecrits
Part of waking up is becoming sensitive to how we become discouraged, how we close down, and where we go for false comfort. To wake up is to become aware of the tendency to judge ourselves, to take our failures personally, to fall into despair, self-pity, depression, frustration, anger, or wherever we tend to go when we believe the story that we are a person who can’t do it right. Seeing all of this is enough. Awareness is its own action. We don’t need to analyze it or impose changes based on our ideas of what should be happening. Just being awake to the present moment, as it is, and seeing clearly what is happening: this is transformative. We are simply awake here and now.
Joan Tollifson, Nothing to Grasp
Suffering begins when you mentally label a situation as bad.
That causes an emotional contraction.
When you let it be, without naming it, enormous power is available to you.
The contraction cuts you off from that power, the power of life itself
Eckhart Tolle
Sometimes I can take things or people for granted and everything becomes part of the “normal everydayness.” At times like this I can drift from one moment to another, doing the best to fit into this place called life. And because of this I can get lost and lose heart. We all can lose each other. It can take reminders to make us step back and realize what a blessing it is to be immersed in a life that is just full of meaning. As de Chardin said “Nothing here is profane for those who know how to see”.
Beauty surrounds us,
but usually we need to be walking
in a garden to know it.
Rumi, Story Water
