The best chance to be whole
is to love whatever gets in the way,
until it ceases to be an obstacle.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
Tag: Acceptance
Welcoming what is given today
Gratitude welcomes what we are given. It doesn’t know any stories about how it should have been. To talk about gratitude is also to talk about what prevents gratitude, about resentment and bitterness. Resentment and bitterness are the residue that comes from dashed expectations. Since the world doesn’t fit our stories, there is a tension where I expected life to be more favorable to my hopes than it has been, or feel that the world has not bothered enough with me. That bitterness sticks in the body and the mind, so that the mind reruns its painful stories and the body stores them in awkwardness and discomfort.
John Tarrant, Practices of Gratitude.
Open to Ambiguity
The test of a psychologically mature person, and therefore spiritually mature, will be found in his or her capacity to handle what one might call the Triple A’s: anxiety, ambiguity and ambivalence. While all of us suffer these onslaughts and react reflexively, the immature psyche especially suffers a tension and seeks to resolve it quickly by a shift right or left to a one-sided solution. The more mature psyche is able to sustain the tension of opposites and contain conflict longer, thereby allowing the development and revelatory potential of the issue to emerge. Anxiety rises in the face of uncertainty, open-endedness. Ambiguity confounds the ego’s lust for security, to fix the world in a permanently knowable place. Ambivalence – the fact that the opposites are always present, visible or not – obliges one to deal with the capacity for dialogue with that other.
James Hollis, Creating a Life.
Storms often lead to growth
There can be bad weather and winds outside and similar storms and movement in our inner life. It is good to see them in a similar way: simply as stuff “passing through”. Sometimes, however, they can shake us out of our habitual patterns and bring us back to what is important.
When changewinds swirl through our lives, they often call us to undertake a new passage of the spiritual journey: that of confronting the lost and counterfeit places within us and releasing our deeper, innermost self – our true selves. They call us to come home to ourselves, to become who we really are.
Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits
Opening to how things actually are
Sometimes we experience dukkha quite directly in our meditation: our knees hurt and our backs hurt and our minds hurt. At other times it’s more subtle. We can’t seem to concentrate; we feel restless, we don’t think we are doing very well. Then our perception of suffering comes from seeing that we cannot control things. Many many times I told my teacher, Sayadaw U Pandita, “Things are going very badly. My head hurts …and my mind is all over the place and I cannot practice. Things are really bad”. He would just say, “That’s dukkha isn’t it” I would look at him expectantly, waiting for him to tell me the magic trick, that one technique that would make all the suffering go away…… But all he would say is “That’s dukkha isn’t it”.
After a while I began to hear what he was saying. “This is a rightful perception”, he was telling me. “This isn’t just a personal drama. This is an opening into one aspect of life. This is part of how it is. This experience has to be seen and acknowledged.” You don’t have to immerse yourself in suffering or get lost in it; but in order to be fully open, you have to let the truth of dukkha in as well. It does not mean that we should be passive or that taking action is never appropriate. Rather it means that we hurt ourselves most by fervently trying to control things so that we never have to suffer.
Joseph Goldstein, Suffering
Not creating more – holding things as they actually are
One problem with meditation is that many people find it boring. People get bored with emptiness. They want to fill up emptiness with something. So recognise that even when the mind is quite empty, the desires and habits are still there, and they will come and want to do something interesting. You have to be patient, willing to turn away from boredom and from the desire to do something interesting and be content with the emptiness of the sound of silence. And you have to be quite determined in turning towards it….One can believe that the sound of silence is something, or that it is an attainment. Yet it is not a matter of having attained anything, but of wisely reflecting on what you experience. The way to reflect is that anything that comes and goes; and the practice is one of knowing things as they are.
We keep with what is, recognising conditions as conditions and the unconditioned as the unconditioned. It’s as simple as that. The practice then becomes one of turning away from conditioned phenomena, not creating anything more around the existing conditions. So whatever arises in your consciousness – anger or greed or anything – you recognise it is there but you make nothing out of it. You can turn to the emptiness of the mind – to the sound of silence. This gives the conditions like anger a way out to cessation; you let it go away.
Ajahn Sumedho, The Sound of Silence
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