After all our futile efforts to transform our ordinary minds into idealized minds, we discover the fundamental paradox of practice is that leaving everything alone is itself what is ultimately transformative.
Barry Magid
Our life as it is
Tag: Acceptance
Concepts of how I should be
Self-love involves a yes to myself in whatever I am going through, instead of holding on to some concept of what or how I should be. Any idea I have about who I am or who I should be is never accurate, for it always falls short of the living presence that I am, as this unfolds freshly in each new moment. Who I am is not a fixed entity but a dynamic stream of experiencing that is alive in every moment – when I let myself happen.
John Welwood
An accepting gaze
In a true you-and-I relationship, we are present mindfully, non-intrusively, the way we are present with things in nature. We do not tell a birch tree it should be more like an elm. We face it with no agenda, only an appreciation that becomes participation: ‘I love looking at this birch’ becomes ‘I am this birch’ and then ‘I and this birch are opening to a mystery that transcends and holds us both.”
David Richo, When the Past is Present
Life is like this
Life is like this. You can’t say it’s a banquet all the time. Breath going in… I wouldn’t describe that as a banquet, or that the sound of silence is life at its best, where it’s just one laugh after another. It’s just like this. Most of our experience is neither one extreme nor another; it’s like this…[yet]..there are ways of noticing that even within what can be physically unpleasant – like cold, dampness and things like this – that we find unpleasant as sensory experiences, that the real suffering is the aversion: “I don’t like this. I don’t want life to be like this. I want to be where there are blue skies and sunshine all the time.”… When you’re seeking happiness and trying to get away from pain and misery, then you’re caught in always trying to get something or hold on to happiness. That leads to an extreme again — wanting, always grasping after the ideal of some refined conscious experience.
Ajahn Sumedho, Intuitive Awareness
The process of working with difficulties
As a practice, this process can be summarized. First of all there is the matter of view. This means acknowledging……that the anxiety……however reasonable, is causing you suffering. There’s a tightness in your chest, an unsettledness in your belly, a tendency to go into red alert. Now the point is not to say “I shouldn’t worry” or “It’s a natural concern” but just to acknowledge your feeling of anxiety. Then there’s the practice: you are actually experiencing anxiety as it is happening, as an embodied feeling, with no should or shouldn’t about it. The next aspect is to steady your awareness around that feeling and let go of interpreting it, dismissing or trying to fix it. Just be with that feeling. Then breathe into the feeling, widen and soften your awareness. Relax a little, give yourself time, ease the energies associated with that feeling. Then tune into the spaciousness, the empathy and the direct clarity of the awareness of that feeling and let the feeling do what it needs to do in order to be felt.
Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth
When *** changes – then …..
We are always getting ready to live,
but never living
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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