Acknowledging what is, with honesty and compassion; continually training in letting thoughts go and in softening when we are hardening— these are steps on the path of awakening. It is how we develop trust in the basic openness and kindness of our being. When we train in letting go of thinking that anything — including ourselves — is either good or bad, we open our minds to practice with forgiveness and humor. And we practice opening to a compassionate space in which good/bad judgments can dissolve. We practice letting go of our idea of a “goal” and letting go of our concept of “progress,” because right there, in that process of letting go, is where our hearts open and soften — over and over again.
Pema Chodron
Category: Make the most of life
How to overcome
Conquer the angry man by love.
Conquer the ill-natured man by goodness.
Conquer the miser with generosity.
Conquer the liar with truth.
The Dhammapada
Not everything goes to plan 3: Change is a part of life
Loss is a fact of life. Impermanence is everywhere we look. We lose loved ones. We lose our health. We lose our glasses. We lose our memory. We lose our money. We lose our keys. We lose our socks. We have to come to terms with this reality. How we deal with them is what makes all the difference. For it is not what happens to us that determines our character, but how we relate to what happens.
Lama Surya Das, Working with Loss
Making our world
We tend to consider imagination too lightly, forgetting that the life we make, for ourselves individually and for the world as a whole, is shaped and limited only by the perimeters of our imagination. Things are as we imagine them to be, as we imagine them into existence. Imagination is creativity, and the way we make our world depends on the vitality of our imagination.
Thomas Moore The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life
Overcoming
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet.
Only through experience of trial and suffering
can the soul be strengthened,
ambition inspired,
and success achieved….
All the world is full of suffering.
It is also full of overcoming.
Helen Keller
Change
Change of one sort or another is the essence of life, so there will always be the loneliness and insecurity that come with change. When we refuse to accept that loneliness and insecurity are part of life, when we refuse to accept that they are the price of change, we close the door on many possibilities for ourselves; our lives become lessened, we are less than fully human.
If we try to prevent, or ignore, the movement of life, we run the risk of falling into the inevitable depression that must accompany an impossible goal. Life evolves; change is constant. When we try to prevent the forward movement of life, we may succeed for a while but, inevitably there is an explosion; the groundswell of life’s constant movement, constant change, is too great to resist.
Jean Vanier, Becoming Human
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