Everything is workable

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For the witness, everything is workable. Nothing needs to be pushed away. To the contrary: our seemingly most intractable neuroses become the doorway into full life. What emerges when we open this door is a happiness that is not the opposite of sadness, a self-love that is not the opposite of self-hate. It is, rather, a happiness that embraces sadness, and a love that embraces hate. Witness consciousness cultivates a place behind dark and light, behind good and evil — behind even personality, behind even the mind. . . .

“As Rumi says, ‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. Meet me there.

Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

Sunday Quote: Our fears

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Failure seldom stops you;

what stops you is the fear of failure

Jack Lemmon

Enact love

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Jesus of the dramatic word, from you we sometimes hear dystopia

of suns and moons and clouds and skies all falling

And we miss the small words of love that can sustain us through the winter

In the dramas of our news cycles

help us all – parishioners, preachers and politicians –

to enact love in the corners, queues and questions of our day

and in so doing discover you,

hiding in the corner, reaching out,

as you always did, creating community

Padraig O’Tuama, Advent Prayer

Over-identification

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Basically, all emotions are modifications of one primordial, undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the loss of awareness of who you are,  beyond name and form. Because of its undifferentiated nature, it is hard to find a name that precisely describes this emotion. ‘Fear’ comes close, but apart from a continuous sense of threat, it also includes a deep sense of abandonment and incompleteness. It may be best to use a term that is as undifferentiated as that basic emotion and simply call it ‘pain.’

One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove that emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain.  You will not be free of that pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from identification with the mind, which is to say from ego. The mind is then toppled from its place of power and Being reveals itself as your true nature.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

What’s our focus

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If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live.

If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.

Thomas Merton, Love and Living

Complaint

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Anxiety, heartbreak, and tenderness mark the in-between state. It’s the kind of place we usually want to avoid. The challenge is to stay in the middle rather than buy into struggle and complaint. The challenge is to let it soften us rather than make us more rigid and afraid.

Pema Chodron