Category: Make the most of life

Sunday Quote: Letting go

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lettinggo_CaptureQueen

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.

Meister Eckhart

Weakness

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File:Baby's hand.JPG

It’s not possible to be afraid of a baby.  The way she looks at us, her smile, her eyes, even her fragility, her trust and her innocence seem to touch even the most profound places in the hearts of us adults. The child is able to penetrate the walls that we have constructed around our hearts to defend ourselves, to protect ourselves, to prove that we are independent, competent, and strong. A child reveals the child who is hidden inside each of us, the child whom we have buried behind these impenetrable walls of protection, of strength, and of our need to win. Within our societies based on rivalry, we are often afraid to show our weakness. Admitting weakness can be dangerous since it might lead to rejection. Instead we feel that we need to show our competence, our capability, our power, our knowledge. If not, we risk begin wounded, rejected, isolated, and scorned. The weakness of the child – especially of a very young child – does the opposite: it attracts us and makes  us smile; it leads us to tenderness and communion. It awakens kindness. …….awakened by something outside of me, and yet it is what is deepest within me. It is “me.  All of us, at the deepest level of our being, are wounded children who are searching for love, for tenderness.

Jean Vanier, Christmas Letter, 2011

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Swept along by the mind

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allondon1

One point that becomes clear about the current of the mind is that whatever way it’s flowing, we tend to get bound up with it. We want to protect and sustain a happy state and feel bad about its eventual decline and disappearance; our identity gets based on that state. On the other hand we feel stuck with and desperate about unhappy states.  In its fullest sense, liberation …. is a liberation from cause and effect in the mind. It’s a process of mentally, emotionally, stepping back from any state and seeing it just as a state, without reactions and attitudes. This simple skill, which most of us do from time to time, is what we develop in … practice.  More radically, it means stepping out of the program that asserts that my life gets  fulfilled by having or being some state or another.

Ajahn Sucitto, Kamma and the End of Kamma

Looking forward, moving on

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dawn 2013 solstice

The days have been especially short this week in Ireland, with dark mornings and darkness closing in early in the afternoon, and the wind and the rain making things seem even gloomier. However, this morning, after a very stormy start, the dawn shone bright and clear. For the ancients, this midwinter solstice sun gave some relief and hope, as it marked the rebirth of light after the shortest days of the year. It marked a turning point, a reversal of the lengthening of night and shortening of days. For us too, these weeks allow a period of reflection and can be a time of turning, as we reflect on what is stagnant in out lives and let go of those things. We all take wrong turnings from time to time, or need a period to start afresh. We move on, and look to the future, even in f we do not know what shape it will take

No seed ever sees the flower

Zen Saying

Just how life is

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File:Tree in Winter - geograph.org.uk - 87151.jpg

You begin to see that there are seasons in your life, in the same way as there as seasons in nature. There are times to cultivate, when you nurture your world and give birth to new ideas and ventures. There are times of flourishing and abundance, when life feels in full bloom, energized and expanding. And there are times of fruition, when things come to an end. They have reached their climax and must be harvested before they begin to fade. And finally there are those times that are cold and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream. Those rhythms in life are natural events.

They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear, but messages of how things are.

Chogram Trungpa Rinpoche, How to Rule

photo iain macdonald

Widening our understanding of life

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Open arms

Today, we teach our children that if you are an effective person, you can control your life. This modern image portrays “winners” as people who have it all together. You are not supposed to have internal conflicts, stress, or anxiety — that means you are incompetent. You’re a loser…. But this perspective flattens life. It denies the possibility of finding a deeper meaning to your experience. If you measure your self-worth and effectiveness according to these superficial cultural standards, then each time you suffer you are forced to interpret suffering as humiliation. Why would you choose to acknowledge suffering if it only stands for failure?

Our culture’s debasement of suffering represents a major loss to us. It denies the validity of many of the significant emotional events in our lives. It narrows life such that we are constantly reacting to a set of questions: How do I get and keep what’s pleasant and avoid or get rid of that which is unpleasant? Am I winning or losing? Am I being praised or blamed?

Philip Moffitt, How Suffering Got a Bad Name