Practice often entails confronting the unpalatable until one’s reactions have cooled; then by holding the attention steady it becomes clear that ‘things’ are actually only ‘the way things appear,’ an appearance compounded by reactions and assumptions, reinforced by the resistance to change and letting go.
Ajahn Sucitto
The very presence of your breath and of your body is one of the most astonishing things in the universe, and it offers the continual opportunity to start over. This awareness allows us to start the entire project of our life over, to reinitiate all the threads of our thought, grounding it all in the immediate experience of our body. What an incredible relief it is to understand that the ultimate place of pilgrimage is right in the center of our very own heart
Richard Freeman
We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life
Jung
The truth is that every fresh experience has this dizziness of freedom that we must move through. Every time we reach beyond what is familiar, there is this necessary acclimation to what is new. It is the doorway to all learning. We needn’t be afraid of it or give it too much power. We simply have to keep leaning into what we are learning.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
Sentiments – on a very cold and wintry New Years Eve morning in Ireland – for the end of this year and the start of a new one:
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
Mary Oliver, Starlings in Winter
An individual embarks on a rite of soul encounter when he recognizes the story he has been living has become too small.
He will have to sacrifice the old story, provoking the ordeal of a good deal of grief. He longs for a new, larger story but knows he cannot discern it with the limited powers of his thinking mind, which naturally clings to the old story. He has many reasons to lament. Lamenting puts the emphasis in the right place. An unrestrained lament is a crowbar into the dark depths of the self. …vision waits in those shadowy realms. The lament expresses, in essence, that the quester has lost his way, has strayed off his path of heart, or has gone as far as he could with what he knows. Your lament, once begun in earnest, gathers emotional momentum; it opens your eyes wide to the world as it opens your heart to your deepest longing. Lamenting takes you to a level of consciousness far deeper than familiar ego concerns, introducing your conscious self to your soul
Bill Plotkin
Mindfulbalance 