The moment at which a feeling of pleasure or pain begins to turn into a disturbing emotion is the point at which meditative awareness can be most effective. Before we describe or explain feelings to ourselves, how do they feel? What do we actually experience before we name them and are caught by them? Meditative awareness helps us to know and come into contact with that basic aspect of our experience of feeling.
Martine Bachelor
Every particle of creation sings its own song of what is and what is not.
Hearing what is can make you wise.
Hearing what is not can drive you mad
Ghalib, Persian Poet, 1797 – 1869
Love means to look at yourself the way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart, without knowing it, from various ills –
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend
Czesław Miłosz, Polish poet
Joy is
being willing for things to be
as they are
Charlotte Joko Beck, Nothing Special
The sad part is that all we’re trying to do is not feel that underlying uneasiness. The sadder part is that we proceed in such a way that the uneasiness only gets worse. The message here is that the only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully. Learn to stay. Learn to stay with uneasiness, learn to stay with the tightening, learn to stay with the itch and urge of shenpa, so that the habitual chain reaction doesn’t continue to rule our lives, and the patterns that we consider unhelpful don’t keep getting stronger as the days and months and years go by.
Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap
