Tag: growth

Opening to how things actually are

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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

Why difficulties are necessary

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Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for awhile.

Plain sailing is pleasant, but you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way.

David Whyte

…..and feel trapped in our lives

Karl Duffy2 Comments
Treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. Rumi, The Guest House

Sometimes the things that are weighing us down in our lives can feel pretty big. We feel pinned down by them, constantly burdened. It could be confusion over  where our career is going; we could have financial worries; often it is family or relationship issues that cause restless nights; we can feel lonely and afraid. All that used to give us some joy has slipped away. At moments like these life seems to be sucked out of us, and we feel physically tired, unable to find real rest. We give up, not wanting to put ourselves in the position to be hurt again, or to grieve again, or   to be frustrated and angered, humiliated, disappointed. One image used in the Christian liturgy today – that of the boulder blocking the tomb – captures well this sense of  helplessness and despair.  Sometimes we can feel like we are being slowly buried alive, spent and weary,  trapped in our own “tombs” . We long for freedom, for a hint of new sense of life or hope  to come to us through the seeming loss and rubble of  our life. Sometimes we can find that when we make space and gain a new perspective outside the scene. At other times however, we need support – a word of encouragement, a friendly face, some “angel” to visit us, to reach down into our darkness and help us bear or overcome the load. We all have occasions to be that angel, in that we can all hold space for  another, kinder, reality for another person. We simply have to be willing to add our fresh shoulder to someone else’s bruised one,  and stand with them in their time of need.

Sometimes the boulder is rolled away, but I cannot move it when

I want to. An angel must. Shall

I ever see the angels face

or will there only be

that molten glow outlining every

separate hair and feather quill,

the sudden wind and odour, sunlight,

music, the pain of my bruised shoulders.

Ruth Fainlight, The Angel


What happens when we get blocked….

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No matter how much we practice, when the going gets rough or we’re in a tight spot, when you’re in that [tight] place, as far as I’m concerned, that is the main place that all the … teachings are pointing to. You could say they’re pointing to full, complete awakening — and that would be true— but the moment of truth is when we’re caught in an habitual way and we just do the habitual thing. The main thing is how we talk to ourselves at that point. I know that one of the main story lines is: “I’m not good enough,” in some kind of form. And we get hooked by something along those lines. 

If at that point, you could just say to yourself, “This is a familiar moment, this is just a common, ordinary occurrence in everyday life, and the choice is mine, again and again and again. And I’ll get plenty of opportunities to work with this. I don’t have to get it right this time. Do I want to proceed with a blocked, frozen life force or do I want to experience it [as] free-flowing?” Do we want to block the possibility of our human life, the creative, life force, the basic energy of our being, which has the potential, when fully recognized and fully experienced, is the experience of full awakening — complete open heart, complete open mind to everything.  Do we want to have access to that in this very brief human life that we have? It’s so short, and the whole thing, from the moment we’re born until we die, is like a chance that we’re given to either unblock ourselves or block ourselves further.

Pema Chodron

….and of becoming our true self

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As soon as a man tries to escape every risk and prefers to experience life only in his head, in the form of ideas and fantasies, as soon as he surrenders to opinions of ‘how it ought to be’ and, in order not to make a false step, imitates others whenever possible, he forfeits the chance of his own independent development. Only if he treads the path bravely and flings himself into life, fearing no struggle and no exertion and fighting shy of no experience, will he mature his personality more fully than the man who is ever trying to keep to the safe side of the road.

Jolande Jacobi, Jungian analyst and author

In tune with our deepest nature, not what is expected

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If you live the life you love, you will receive shelter and blessings.  Sometimes the great famine of blessings in and around us derives from the fact that we are not living the life we love; rather, we are living the life that is expected of us.  We have fallen out of rhythm with the secret signature and light of our own nature.

John O Donohue