Li Po ( 760 A.D), considered the greatest of the Chinese poets, wrote these famous words on friendship
What is the use of talking,
and there is no end of talking,
There is no end of things in the heart.
Try a different approach: Don’t move on
The core issue is that we are not comfortable with life as it is – changing, with indistinct boundaries, not meeting our unrealistic expectation. As children most of us learn, from parents, relatives, peers, and caregivers, to want something else, such as external approval, the security of things that don’t change, only pleasurable experiences, or the self-satisfaction of always being in the right.
We are like the drug addict looking for an unending high. We don’t find it with one drug, so we try another drug, then another and another. The variations are wonderfully creative and endless. Looking for the perfect partner, job, community, or profession, can be the drug. Looking for the perfect spiritual teacher can also be the drug. We might hop from one to another, exuberant for a while, and then disappointed. We move on.
When we walk the path of mindfulness, we are encouraged to try a radically different approach. We calm our minds, we focus on the present moment, and we embrace what we find.
Pema Chodron
Meeting your destiny
You meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it.
Jung
On not running away in times of difficulty
Building on yesterday’s post about staying with the fears and difficulties that are prompted by relationships and manifest themselves as emotions or feelings in the body. As I have said before, the essence of our practice is learning to stay, and in concrete terms this can mean simply staying with the feeling in the body. Running away – into distractions or compulsive activity, or in a more decisive way such as starting a new relationship or initiating sudden changes of lifestyle – can take us away from the growth which a crisis often offers. Our sitting practice is the place where we work at learning how to do this. It is where we gradually strengthen our capacity for faithfulness to our actual daily existence, no matter what arises.
The problem with running away when a relationship becomes difficult is that it’s also turning away from ourselves and our potential breakthroughs. Fleeing the raw, wounded places in ourselves because we don’t think we can handle them is a form of self-rejection and self-abandonment that turns our feeling body into an abandoned, haunted house. The more we flee our shadowy places, the more they fester in the dark, and the more haunted this house becomes. And the more haunted it becomes, the more it terrifies us….. Naturally we want to do everything we can to avoid this place, fix it, or neutralize it, so we’ll never have to experience such pain again……This is a vicious circle that keeps us cut off from and afraid of ourselves.
John Welwood, Intimate Relationship as a Spiritual Crucible.
Sunday Quote: Avoiding the real issue
Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity,
so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.
Sogyal Rinpoche
A key way of working with fears: Stay with the emotion in the body
As the previous post noted, we try to bring awareness to the patterns which repeat in our lives. However, they can often have very deep roots in the emotional wounds which we carry with us from the past of which we are unaware. This quote points to a way of working with them as they actually manifest in the day-to-day of our experience. Most of our deep wounds are connected to relationships in the past and therefore we can imagine a situation where a current relationship causes our anxiety and fears to rise. These then give rise to a cascade of thoughts about ourselves or others, painting worse-case scenarios or stories about deficiencies in ourselves. What is the best way to work with this? In this moment we do not know the roots in the past which the experience has touched into. However, we do have a very real feeling – of fear, or of flight – in the body. So we stay with that. We acknowledge, if possible, the story line that the mind is running, but leave it to one side. We try to stay with fear or anxiety as an embodied feeling and work with the energies associated with the feeling. Stay with the emotion with kindness and non-judgment as much as you can as a feeling in the body, breathing into the feelings and widening the space around them. In this way we hold ourselves and our fears in awareness and acceptance, just as a mother would hold a frightened child.
You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware.
Eckhart Tolle
