Stay with the feeling in the body. Don’t advance into proliferating a story. Don’t retreat into denying the sense of hurt.
Not advancing, not retreating,
Not real, not empty.
There is an ocean of bright clouds.
There is an ocean of dark clouds.
Dogen, 1200 – 1253
photo Nicolas A. Tonelli
The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.
David Whyte, Vulnerability
photo aditya maurya
One of the nice things about a Saturday after an intense week is that we can come back to ourselves, and find within us a centre that is always there, even when we lose sight of it:
I lost my way, I forgot to call on your name. The raw heart beat against the world, and the tears were for my lost victory. But you are here. You have always been here. The world is all forgetting, and the heart is a rage of directions, but your name unifies the heart, and the world is lifted into its place.
Blessed is the one who waits in the traveller’s heart for his turning
Leonard Cohen, Poem#50 from The Book of Mercy
An inner voice asked, ‘What would happen if, in this moment, I didn’t try to do anything, to make anything different?’ I immediately felt the visceral grip of fear and then a familiar sinking hole of shame – the very feelings I had been trying to avoid for as long as I could remember.
But then the same inner voice whispered very quietly, familiar refrain, ‘Just let it be.
Tara Brach
photo alex proimos
A little more on wandering in a desert or going through a barren or difficult period in our lives
Not knowing what to do is just as real and just as useful as knowing what to do.
Not knowing stops us from taking false directions. Not knowing what to do, we start to pay real attention. Just as people lost in the wilderness, on a cliff face or in a blizzard pay attention with a kind of acuity that they would not have if they thought they knew where they were. Why? Because for those who are really lost, their life depends on paying real attention. If you think you know where you are, you stop looking.
David Whyte
The psychological self is rooted in time. It needs to feel it is on a journey, that it is getting somewhere — anywhere. The journey is what provides it with a feeling of existence and continuity. If it weren’t going somewhere it would be forced to feel the fear of the present moment, the fear of not existing, of the void beneath its feet. Our individual journey is reinforced by the cultural norm. Our culture is so fixated on the necessity of doing that if we are idle for a while we are very likely to think we are wasting our time and our lives. Everyone wants to “have a life” and “get a life,” and that usually means throwing ourselves into some gainful activity that will show a tangible result.
Roger Housden, Dropping the Struggle
photo: payton chung
