When we’re feeling aggressive — and in some sense this would apply to any strong feeling — there’s an enormous pregnant quality that pulls us in the direction of wanting to get some resolution. It hurts so much to feel the aggression that we want it to be resolved. So what do we usually do? We do exactly what is going to escalate the aggression and the suffering. We strike out; we hit back. [However] Developing patience and fearlessness means learning to sit still with the edginess of the energy. We discover that joy and happiness, peace, harmony and being at home with yourself and your world come from sitting still with the moodiness of energy until it rises, dwells and passes away. The energy never resolves itself into something solid. So all the while, we stay in the middle of the energy. The path of touching in on the inherent softness of the genuine heart is to sit still and be patient with that kind of energy.
Pema Chodron, The Answer to Anger and Aggression is Patience
I think of moments of pressure and difficulty as like this – as gateways, the beginning of a journey…It’s easy to forget to be curious, and to grab an off-the-shelf knowledge, something like “This is awful”. Not reaching for off-the-shelf understandings, though, is an important skill. The whole of the ancient, master teachings on suffering come down to this: Suffering is the notion “This isn’t it” and its variants, such as “It shouldn’t be happening” and “I have to know how this will turn out”. Freedom, waking up, and fearlessness comes down to the simplicity of “Wait a minute, what if this is it” and its variant “I don’t know”
We are so trained to think of money as our wealth, or ’our capital.‘ But there are so many kinds of ’capital‘ besides money, and some are more available and even more valuable. For example, whenever we gather to make something happen, we need someone who has wisdom capital,
Yesterday was the Celtic feast of Imbolc, celebrated because it is halfway between the winter and the spring solstices. It was marked by the lighting of fires, and this passed into the important Irish feast of Saint Brigid, whose monastery kept alight a sacred eternal flame. In a similar way today’s feast, the Christian feast of Candlemas, traditionally involved a procession of candles and the blessing of candles for use in the home. It would seem that these two celebrations, one older than the other, testify to a need for people to light a fire around this time, to remind themselves of light and warmth around this midway point of winter, to give some encouragement when the cold and darkness may seem to be never-ending. 
