Never pray to be a better slave when God is trying to get you out of your situation
Shannon L. Alder
Sunday Quote: Free
Tag: Freedom
Sunday Quote: Cage
We spend much of our time in a cage created by our own fear of discomfort.
Pema Chödrön
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Look within
Now, more than ever, we need to develop our own inner resources:
Every man has his own courage,
and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.
Emerson
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Space that leads to profound peace
The wisdom that arises from mindfulness makes space for the sense of self to be and not to be.
Not believing any one these fleeting identities to be who we really are, we release being concerned about any of it. In fact, we sit back and watch the whole show like an amused grandmother, quietly watching over the antics of her grandchildren. This is the profound peace we are so busy searching for. It does not come from creating and perfecting our personality.
Freedom comes when we see through the machinations of “self” and cease to be bothered by or believe any of it.
Mark Coleman, From Suffering to Peace: The True Promise of Mindfulness
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Always close to this
When we are willing to be intimate with what actually is here now, to look directly at all of our experience, we might recognize that this is our life, however different from our thoughts and ideas about it. It is as if we hunker down and actually get very real, recognizing that our thoughts of gaining and losing, good and bad, happy and sad, are what distance us from ourselves.
Once Dongshan was asked, ‘What is the deepest truth? What is the wisdom that liberates?’
His response was, ‘I am always close to this.’
It is the closeness itself – the intimacy with what is here with us now – that is the truth that liberates us.
Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, Most Intimate: A Zen Approach to Life’s Challenges
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Let go of unworthiness
The sense of unworthiness, it seems, comes out of our being talked out of, trained out of, conditioned out of trusting our natural being. It is the result of being turned away from ourselves, taught to distrust ourselves. We are worthy of letting go of our unworthiness. If we did nothing but practice letting go of unworthiness, much of the stuff we’re working so hard to clear away would have no support system. We would have more room to grow. Consciously we surrender unworthiness as it arises, not entertaining it with the ego’s list of credits. the work which will awaken us is that of becoming keenly aware of unworthiness without judging it.
Stephen Levine, A Gradual Awakening
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