Happiness is like a butterfly:
the more you chase it, the more it will elude you.
But if you turn your attention to other things,
it will come and sit softly on your shoulder
Thoreau
Category: Make the most of life
Sunday Quote: Persevering
Older now,
you find holiness in anything
that continues,
dream after dream.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Integrating the shadow
As other posts this week have already discussed, true human development comes from relaxing with, accepting and integrating aspects of our personality that make us fearful and insecure. As Jung said, our journey in life is not towards some kind of perfection, but towards wholeness.
If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow.
And if such a person wants to be cured it is necessary to find a way
in which his conscious personality and his shadow can live together.
Jung
Two ways of working with our fear
A quotation from Pema Chodron – in the same theme as posts from the last few days – on our need to turn towards the fundamental groundlessness which exists in life and in our hearts. The actual practice is outlined here – becoming aware of how fear manifests itself in our body and trying to stay with that, rather than moving into stories of blame or defectiveness.
Raw fear initially emerges as a dot in space, as a doorway that can go either way. If we choose to take notice of the actual experience of fear, whether it is just a queasy feeling in our stomach or actual terror, whether it is a subtle level of discomfort or mind-numbing dramatic anxiety, we can smile at it, believe it or not. It could be a literal smile or a metaphor for coming to know fear, turning towards fear, touching fear. In that case, rather than fear setting off a chain reaction where you are trying to protect yourself from it, it becomes a source of tenderness. We experience our vulnerability, but we don’t feel that we have to harden ourselves in response…We’re all very familiar with the experience of fear escalating, or the experience of running away from fear. But have we ever taken the time to truly touch our fear, to be present with it and experience it fully? Do we know what it might mean to smile at fear?
Pema Chodron, Smile at Fear
Accepting our emptiness
Following on from yesterday’s post, and applying it to our notions of psychological growth and maturity. Just as in nature, we need to be able to tolerate – and stop fighting with – the complexity, disruptions, reversals and emptiness which are part of the normal human condition, and stop seeing them as unusual or as enemies to growth. In this way we move away from trying to get rid of them, to accepting and authenticating them.
In our zeal to eliminate the ghosts of our childhood, to nourish the empty places of emotional insufficiency and to achieve the pinnacle of psychological development…we were treating feelings of emptiness as something that needed to be fixed and cured, and therefore losing the ground upon which we rest. Our aversion to emptiness is such that we have become experts at explaining it away, distancing ourselves from it, or assigning blame for its existence on the past or on the faults of others. We contaminate it with our personal histories and expect that it will disappear when we have resolved our personal problems. Thus. Western psychologists are trained to understand a report of emptiness as indicative of a deficiency in someone’s emotional upbringing, a defect in character, a defense against overwhelming feelings of aggression, or as a stand-in for feelings of inadequacy. Since most of us share one or more of these traits, it becomes easy to pathologize a feeling that in Buddhism serves as a starting point for self-exploration.
Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart
On learning from nature
There is often an unspoken assumption that things should go smoothly in life, or that the Universe has a direct plan for us, and that it communicates it easily. Consequently, we get upset that things are not always that straightforward. When things go wrong we can often regard it as a violation of some supposed natural entitlement to order and predictability. However, if we look at the natural world we do not find complete support for this underlying assumption. The recent turbulence in the weather, and the natural disasters of this past year, demonstrate that things in nature are frequently unpredictable and disruptive. So we should not expect anything different in our lives. Bad things can happen and our lives can change, in ways that we cannot predict. Things happen in indirect ways, and reasons are not always immediately evident. Patience is needed if we wish to understand or work out what is our path.
Clouds are not spheres, Mountains are not cones,
Coastlines are not circles and bark is not smooth,
nor does lightning travel in a straight line.
Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity.
Benoit Mandelbrot, French-American mathematician.
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