Self-forgiveness

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There’s a kind of basic misunderstanding that we should try to be better than we already are, that we should try to improve ourselves, that we should try to get away from painful things, and that if we could just learn how to get away from the painful things, then we would be happy.

Pema Chödrön

When we practice meditation, we practice a double movement: there is a movement of return to the breath, a movement of recollection of presence, of samadhi — and there is a movement of mindfulness, of allowing everything to be just as it is. Last Sunday, I realized that the movement of return can also be a movement of allowing, of self-forgiveness. All the prodigal sons and daughters of our thoughts and dreams and gnarly little complexes are welcome to come to the feast of this present moment.

Tracy Cochran, Be a Lighthouse

photo scem.info

Never enough

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One of the more persistent forms of suffering, the sense that we have to do more, have more:

One of the deepest habitual patterns that we have

is to feel that now is not enough.

Pema Chodron

Sunday Quote: Losing our fears

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Who sees all beings in his own Self

and his own Self in all beings, 

loses all fear.

Isha Upanishad

Standing in the face of disappointment

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Stay with the feeling in the body. Don’t advance into proliferating a story. Don’t retreat into denying the sense of hurt.

Not advancing, not retreating,

Not real, not empty.

There is an ocean of bright clouds.

There is an ocean of dark clouds.

Dogen, 1200 –  1253

photo Nicolas A. Tonelli

Today…Just let it be

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An inner voice asked, ‘What would happen if, in this moment, I didn’t try to do anything, to make anything different?’ I immediately felt the visceral grip of fear and then a familiar sinking hole of shame – the very feelings I had been trying to avoid for as long as I could remember.

But then the same inner voice whispered very quietly, familiar refrain, ‘Just let it be.

Tara Brach

photo alex proimos

life is falling down and getting back up

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The process of growth is, it seems, the art of falling down. Growth is measured by the gentleness and awareness with which we once again pick ourselves up, the lightness with which we dust ourselves off, the openness with which we continue and take the next unknown step, beyond our edge, beyond our holding, into the remarkable mystery of being.

stephen levine

photo emilio labrador