Tag: growth

Difficult moments in our lives

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In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.  Rilke

Every shift in our life comes courtesy of the friendly forces; every catastrophe can offer us exactly what we need to awaken into who we really are. It’s difficult, though, when you are in the middle of a painful transition to mine the experience for inner growth.  And when your life falls apart,  it’s a lot easier to blame someone,  or to rail against fate, or to shut down to the hopeful message carried by the winds of change. Sometimes when friends try to help by saying “There’s a reason for everything” or “It’s a blessing in disguise”, you just want to run away or you  want to say” Yeah, if it’s such a blessing, then why does it hurt so much?” So forgive me when I say that everything in life is a blessing – whether it comes as a gift wrapped in happy times or as a heartbreak, a loss, or a tragedy…. It helps me to remember that everyone is confused when the friendly forces come knocking; there is no one alive who did not want to go back asleep instead of making a big change; and the journey from Once-Born innocence to Twice-Born wisdom is never easy.

Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open

…. and the self is continually changing…

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Some similar reflections, this time from a neuroscientific point of view:

Now we come to perhaps the single greatest source of suffering  –  the apparent self. Look into your own experience. When you take things personally –  or hunger for approval –  what happens? You suffer. When you identify with something as “me” or try to possess something as “mine,” you set yourself up for suffering, since all things are frail and will inevitably pass away. When you stand apart from other people and the world as “I,” you feel separate and vulnerable  – and suffer. On the other hand, when you relax the subtle sense of contraction at the very nub of “me” –  when you’re immersed in the flow of life rather than standing apart from it, when ego and egotism fade to the background  –  then you feel more peaceful and fulfilled. 

The experiences of self you just had — that it has many aspects, is just part of the whole person, is continually changing, and varies according to conditions — depend on the physical substrates of self in your brain. Thoughts, feelings, images, and so on exist as patterns of information represented by patterns of neural structure and activity. In the same way, the various aspects of the apparent self – and the intimate and powerful experience of being a self – exist as patterns in the mind and brain. The many aspects of self are based on structures and processes spread throughout the brain and nervous system, and embedded in the body’s interactions with the world.….In sum, from a neurological standpoint, the everyday sense of being a unified self is an utter illusion: the apparently coherent and solid “I” is actually built from many subsystems and sub-subsystems over the course of development, with no fixed center, and the most fundamental basis of the sense of “I”  –  subjectivity  –  emerges in the field of interactions the body has with the world.

Rich Hansen, Buddha’s Brain : The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

Letting there be room

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Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart

Trust in the difficult

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People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. The future stands still, but we move in infinite space. How could it not be difficult for us? […]

And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Rainer Maria Rilke

……and not judging it

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As I have said, nothing that arises in our body and in our life happens outside of our journey, of our path, to full realization.  Everything that occurs needs to be welcomed with an attitude of acceptance and openness. No matter what happens, it is imperative that we do not judge it. Especially when we are going through very difficult and trying circumstances, one cannot repeat to oneself too often, “Do not judge it; do not judge it.” Only when we resist the temptation to judge what we are going through can the journey we need to make at this moment continue to unfold, and can we receive the needed development and transformation it may bring.

Reginald Ray, Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body.

Allowing emotions, not running from them

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One or two posts these days on how to work with difficult and frightening emotions: Awareness is the key to living fully in each moment, even if the moment contains difficult emotions. It is the same practice  – insofar as it is possible – to spend time with and hold emotions in a non-judgmental awareness without making them into a statement about ourselves or the direction of our lives. Gentleness, kindness and self-compassion are the key to this work, leading to a genuine friendliness toward ourselves and towards whatever passes through the body-mind.

With radical accountability, all emotions are observed as experiences only, pointing nowhere, implicating no one and signifying nothing. Though it is no one’s fault that we have an emotion, it is still essential to hold the emotion fully within awareness without wavering. Emotions need observation and allowance, not our analysis or fixation. The story that accompanies the emotion dies with accountability. The story was never true to begin with; we needed it to provide relief from the pain of being “me”. Though we did not know it at the time, sustaining the story’s untruth through inattention was causing even greater suffering than if we had allowed the pain to express itself in awareness. Radical accountability allows all experience to be itself. 

Rodney Smith, Stepping out of Self-Deception