Tag: Acceptance

Not giving up on ourselves

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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The idea of developing courage doesn’t seem to trigger people’s inadequacies. I think they know they have some courage. The problem is they think they’re supposed to be courageous in facing the outside world, whereas what is so profoundly transformative is the courage to look at yourself. It’s the courage to not give up on yourself, even though you do see your aggression, jealousy, meanness, and so on. And it turns out that in facing these things, we develop not self-denigration but compassion for our shared humanity.

Pema Chodron

photo Derek Harper

 

A meeting place

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We need to prepare a meeting place, an awareness that can meet what arises without contracting.  The basis of this is training in mindfulness: staying with contact without formulating a self and a reaction. This means that for a moment you can not know how things should be, or what to do. If you allow yourself this mindful uncertainty, that opens the essential space for a response rather than a reaction to arise. So when the feeling and the impression or ‘meaning’ come up, just wait right there. Don’t work from previous models. Don’t blink. Don’t try to change it. Don’t make a ‘me’ out of it. Then hold your awareness where it subsides. And with skill in that, the world of ‘me and it’ changes by itself.

Ajahn Sucitto, Is there an End?

photo steve evans from Citizen of the World

How we look

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A mother lovingly looking at her baby

It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in themselves.

The least of things with a meaning is always worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

Jung, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: The practice of psychotherapy

As we go along

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You cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

photo Paul Glazzard

Not judging our emotions

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Times of travel or transition can give rise to a lot of emotions and they always like to give birth to thoughts about how we are doing or where we are headed in life. It is best to just hold emotions as mental events that pass through and not believe the stories that arise out of them:

Trust in the simple act of attention. Awareness includes emotions as mental objects, rather than as subjects. If you don’t know this, you tend to identify with your emotions and your emotions become yourself. You become this emotional thing that has become terribly upset because the world is not respecting you enough. Our refuge is in the deathless reality rather than the transient and unstable conditions. If you trust in awareness, then the self and the emotions about oneself, whatever they might be, can be seen in terms of what they are — not judged, not made into a problem, but just noticed: “It’s like this.”

Ajahn Sumedho, The Problem with Personality

photo andeggs

More about non-forcing

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Statue representing the portrait of Buddha in meditation. Copy space.

Another reflection on the value of not forcing (wu-wei)  in our lives, and the benefits that come from trusting and letting go:

The ten directions converging,

Each learning to do nothing

This is where we learn the Buddha’s training;

Mind’s empty, all’s finished.

P’ang Yun, 740 – 808