Tag: Acceptance

Changing our relationship to our expectations

Karl Duffy2 Comments

We can learn to recognize that the difficulty is our path instead of trying to escape from it. This is a radical yet necessary change in our perspective. When uncomfortable things happen to us, we rarely want to have anything to do with them. We might respond with the belief ‘Things shouldn’t be this way’ or ‘Life shouldn’t be so messy.’ Who says? Who says that life shouldn’t be a mess? When life is not fitting our expectations of how it’s supposed to be, we usually try to change it to fit our expectations. But the key to practice is not to try to change our life but to change our relationship to our expectations — to learn to see whatever is happening as our path.

Ezra Bayda

Letting go of knowing

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

One thing that we notice very quickly when we practice meditation is that our experience is always changing. Thus practice helps us develop a mental flexibility by keeping us in the present moment, accepting what is present in the body and in our lives. We work with life as it is, without always being able to see the overall picture. Sometimes things become clear  only long after the event. We come to see that there is a larger context in which our life is unfolding and accept change as being one of the great realities of life. When we understand the impermanence of things, as the old saying tells us, we cease to struggle.

Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change.

Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

We become what we practice

Karl Duffy3 Comments

The painful thing is that when we buy into disapproval, we are practicing disapproval. When we buy into harshness, we are practicing harshness. The more we do it, the stronger these qualities become. How sad it is that we become so expert at causing harm to ourselves and others. The trick then is to practice gentleness and letting go. We can learn to meet whatever arises with curiosity and not make it such a big deal.

Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart:Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Seeing ourselves as we truly are

Karl Duffy1 Comment

People who are suffering want to change, but they do not know how. They feel…that they have to go into their problems, or get rid of them entirely. They do not know that to bring about true healing they have to learn to see themselves as they truly are.……Powerful emotional reactions have the capacity to take hold of us and drive our behavior. We believe in these reactions more than we believe in anything else, but they become the means by which we both hide from ourselves and attempt to cope with a world of ceaseless change and unpredictability.

Mark Epstein, Going on Being:Buddhism and the Way of Change.

Why difficulties are necessary

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

If we are going to achieve our purpose in life, we must be willing to fall out of grace and accept its lessons. When we feel righteous about ourselves, or deny our brokenness, we are fighting against the higher states of grace that await us. Failure is built into grace. You cannot have one without the other. It’s like two sides of a single coin. Everyone who has achieved a state of grace is certain at some point to fall, and to have fallen many times before. Every successful person, everyone you respect, will tell you that they have mountains of failure behind them…

When we are in grace, we begin to take things for granted and we actually stop working on ourselves. Falling out of grace shakes us up. It reconnects us to the larger universe in order for us to see ourselves anew. It forces us to rediscover where our true center begins, and to learn what needs to be set aside.

Sobonfu Some, Falling Out of Grace: Meditations on Loss, Healing and Wisdom

photo http://www.vagabondjourney.com

When we are blown around

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Black Birch Leaves and Twig

 

When green leaves turn in the wind
I vow with all beings
to enjoy the forces that turn me
face up, face down on my stem

Robert Aitken Roshi,  The Dragon Who Never Sleeps