The meditation orientation is not about fixing pain or making it better. It’s about looking deeply into the nature of pain — making use of it in certain ways that might allow us to grow. In that growing, things will change, and we have the potential to make choices that will move us toward greater wisdom and compassion, including self-compassion, and thus toward freedom from suffering.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, At Home in our Bodies.
When we apply the instruction to be soft and nonjudgmental to whatever we see at this very moment, the embarrassing reflection in the mirror becomes our friend. We soften further and lighten up more, because we know it’s the only way we can continue to work with others and be of any benefit in the world. This is the beginning of growing up.
Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty
The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white.
Neither need you do anything but be yourself.
Lao Tzu
We have lived,
not in proportion to the number of years that we have spent on the earth,
but in proportion as we have enjoyed
Henry David Thoreau, Journals
We may think that letting go means not having, or getting rid of something; but actually we can just allow it to go, rather than holding on to it or trying to throw it away. Sometimes just accepting and recognising is enough. It is a way of letting go of the aversion, the negativity. Like every other condition that we experience: if it arises, it will cease. And usually it ceases much more quickly if we can really let it go. Sometimes people use the expression ‘just letting be’.
Ajahn Candasiri, Simple Kindness
We are born with only one obligation – to be completely who we are. Yet how much of our time is spent comparing ourselves to others, dead and alive? This is encouraged as necessary in the pursuit of excellence. Yet a flower in its excellence does not yearn to be a fish, and a fish in its unmanaged elegance does not long to be a tiger. But we humans find ourselves always falling into the dream of another life. Or we secretly aspire to the fortune or fame of people we don’t really know. When feeling badly about ourselves, we often try on other skins rather than understand and care for our own. Yet when we compare ourselves to others, we see neither ourselves nor those we look up to. We only experience the tension of comparing, as if there is only one ounce of being to feed all our hungers.
Mark Nepo, The Book Of Awakening
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