Tag: Acceptance

Being as fluid as life itself is

Karl Duffy2 Comments

It seems to me that fear is more basic than the emotions. It comes from our basic confusion. Fear touches on the most basic aspect of the human dilemma: “How do we live in an uncertain world?”  We understand this when we sit to practice. We don’t really know what to do with our experience. We either get lost in our thoughts or try to suppress them. Somehow, we can’t find our resting place with the energy and expression of our mind. It can feel overwhelming – scary. … So we can say that, due to our inability to relax around experience, we contract in fear or get lost in our confusion. It says in the teachings that this “overwhelm” causes us to cling tightly. This experience of clinging tightly is what we misunderstand as the self. We continue to look for stability and security, and yet the world (our inner and outer worlds) is not a static situation. What we experience as a self, we could say, is a continued desire for happiness and freedom from suffering. The problem we have is that there is so much bewilderment around our experience and not knowing what to do with it, we contract out of fear…..There is panic, which is a frozen,  very physical,  sensation. Our breath gets shallow. We feel like life is something happening to us, rather than feeling a part of the bigness of life.

But however contracted we get,  life continues to flow.…no matter how tightly we hold on. We can’t separate ourselves from life. Even a fortress is part of life. And even as a fortress we are still in relationship with life and our mind. That we are part of the great interdependence of life means that actually, we are very, very big – infinite, in fact.  So the purpose of practice is to find our true relationship with life, rather than contract. Trying to create security in a world that is fluid is a good definition of pain/samsara. The purpose is to value life and let it touch us and change us – so that we can be as fluid as life, which is a poignant and beautiful, freeing and emboldening experience.

Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, Moving Beyond Fear

…and letting go of an idea of perfection

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When we seek happiness through accumulation, either outside of ourselves–from other people, relationships, or material goods–or from our own self-development, we are missing the essential point. In either case we are trying to find completion. But according to Buddhism, such a strategy is doomed. Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.

Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

Contentment with oneself…

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When  you  sit, let things settle and allow all  your  discordant self  with  its ungenuineness and unnaturalness to  dissolve,  out of  that  rises  your real being. You  experience  an  aspect  of yourself which is more genuine and more authentic-the “real” you.  As  you  go deeper, you begin to discover and connect  with  your fundamental goodness. The  whole point of meditation is to get used to the that  aspect which you have forgotten. In Tibetan “meditation” means  “getting used to”. Getting used to what? To your true nature.  This  is  why,  you are told to “rest in the nature of mind”. You  just quietly  sit  and let all thoughts and concepts dissolve.  It  is like  when the clouds dissolve or the mist evaporates, to  reveal the clear sky and the sun shining down. When everything dissolves like  this, you begin to experience your true nature, to  “live”. Then you know it, and at that moment, you feel really good. It is unlike  any  other  feeling of well being  that  you  might  have experienced.  This is a real and genuine goodness, in  which  you feel  a  deep sense of peace, contentment  and  confidence  about yourself.

Sogyal Rinpoche,  Essential Teachings on Meditation

Noticing our sense of entitlement

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Learning to live from genuine happiness requires first seeing what blocks it. One of the major blocks is our deeply rooted sense of entitlement. In fact, this is a big part of the “problem” of happiness: we firmly believe that we should be happy. We think it’s our right, and consequently, we feel entitled to it, even if we’re not clear what happiness is, except to feel good. This expectation can have many faces. For example, we often feel entitled to good health, expecting that we can and should be able to stay youthful and physically fit. When life comes along to greet us with illness or injury we can easily sink into a stupor of frustration and even despair. Sometimes just get­ting a cold will trigger our anxieties over losing control and feeling powerless. This sense of entitlement — which basically says that life should go the way we want and expect it to go — even tells us we shouldn’t have to experience discomfort. Then, when we do experience discomfort, we feel that some­thing is wrong; we might get angry and feel it’s unfair, or we may feel sorry for ourselves.

Ezra Bayda, Beyond Happiness

Sunday Quote: difficulties

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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties,

only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

Alain de Botton

Trusting the ups and downs of life

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Due to the current overlay of therapy terminology in our language, everyone now seems to wish for “closure.” This word is unfortunate: it is not faithful to the open-ended rhythm of experience. Creatures made of clay with porous skins and porous minds are quite incapable of the hermetic sealing that the strategy of “closure” seems to imply. The word completion is a truer word. Each experience has within it a dynamic of unfolding and a narrative of emergence. Oscar Wilde once said, “The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realized is right.” When a person manages to trust experience and be open to it, the experience finds its own way to realization. Though such an ending may be awkward and painful, there is a sense of wholesomeness and authenticity about it. Then the heart will gradually find that this stage has run its course and the ending is substantial and true. Eventually the person emerges with a deeper sense of freedom, certainty, and integration.

The nature of calendar time is linear; it is made up of durations that begin and end. The Celtic imagination always sensed that beneath time there was eternal depth. This offers us a completely different way of relating to time. It relieves time of the finality of ending. While something may come to an ending on the surface of time, its presence, meaning, and effect continue to be held into the eternal. This is how spirit unfolds and deepens. 

John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us