We often ask, ‘what’s wrong?’ Doing so, we invite painful seeds of sorrow to come up and manifest. We feel suffering, anger, and depression, and produce more such seeds. We would be much happier if we tried to stay in touch with the healthy, joyful seeds inside of us and around us. We should learn to ask, ‘what’s not wrong?’ and be in touch with that.”
Thich Nhat Hahn
If you can solve your problem, then what is the need of worrying?
If you cannot solve it, then what is the use of worrying?
Shantideva
What is known as “realizing the mystery” is nothing but breaking through to grasp an ordinary persons life.
Deshan
For most people, just the thought of being ordinary is like a cross to a vampire; it’s the thing we fear most. We want to be unique and special, not ordinary, and we turn to books on meditation, perhaps, to help turn us into the kind of special person we want to be. None of us want to accept the mind that we have got. We come to practice because there are aspects of the mind that we don’t know how to come to terms with.
This dread of being ordinary has many roots deep in our psychological makeup. We dread being lost in the crowd, feeling that we have never gotten the attention or acknowledgement that we deserve. So much of our life is spent running away from the ordinary, and towards what we think of as some kind of a spiritual alternative.
Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness
All the suffering in the world comes from seeking pleasure for oneself.
All the happiness in the world comes from seeking pleasure for others.
Shantideva
Sometimes we labour under the mistaken belief that happiness can only come if there are absolutely no difficulties or when everything is resolved in our life or our life history. However, we sometimes need to recognize and simply accept the different parts of our lives and the different directions we want to take, and allow that perfect integration is unlikely to be ever achieved fully in this life. We can hold these different parts and accept the different feelings that exist within us, as we are, without demanding that they all harmonize. As the writer Mark Epstein put it so well in his excellent book, we can be “in pieces, without falling apart”
Contradictions have always existed in the soul of man. But it is only when we prefer analysing to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which makes them trivial by comparison.
Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude
Things change so quickly. On Friday the news was dominated by weddings and dresses, by pomp and circumstance. Yesterday we awoke to news of death and differences, and to the insecurity it provokes. Such changes can make the ground we stand on feel quite uncertain. However, it is not just change on a world level but how we deal with the smaller changes in our lives that determines our ongoing sense of inner peace and calm. We expend quite a lot of energy each day in trying to hold on to what is familiar and in attempting to make the world conform to how we would like it to be. The problem with this – other than the futile waste of energy – is that we limit our ability to experience joy in the present moment as it actually is. If we approach moments with fear, rather than opening to how they are, we cannot see the richness in them.
A contrary strategy works best: Stop trying to grasp, to control the world around you or the day ahead of you. In doing so you loosen the grip of fear and give each experience the possibility to bring its richness. Letting go of control lets go of suffering.
It is not because of impermanence that we suffer
But because of our ideas about permanence.
Thich Nhat Hahn
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