Tag: heart

Splitting, blaming, doesn’t help

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If we think of suffering as something unnatural, something that we shouldn’t be experiencing, then it’s not much of a leap to begin to look for someone to blame for our suffering. If I’m unhappy, then I must be the victim of someone or something – an idea that’s all too common in the West. The victimizer may be the government, the educational system, abusive parents, a ‘dysfunctional family,’ the other gender or our uncaring mate. Or, we may turn the blame inward: there’s something wrong with me, I’m the victim of disease, of defective genes perhaps. But the risk of continuing to focus on assigning blame, and maintaining a victim stance, is the perpetuation of our suffering – with persistent feelings of anger, frustration, and resentment.

Dalai Lama

When we are unhappy

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As I have written before, Jacques Lusseyran was a French writer who took part in the Resistance against the German Occupation, and he continued to organize groups against the Nazis even after he was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. His work was all the more striking because he was totally blind from the age of 8, following an accident at school. His experiences give him a certain authority when it comes to reflections on what makes for contentment or unhappiness:

Unhappiness, I saw then, comes to each of us because we think ourselves at the center of the world, because we have the miserable conviction that we alone suffer to the point of unbearable intensity. Unhappiness is always to feel oneself imprisoned in one’s own skin, in one’s own brain.

Jacques Lusseyran.

Where joy comes from

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Joy seems to be part of an unconditional wish to live, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences or expectations. Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole  and to show up and meet with whatever is there. It has a kind of invincibility that attachment to any particular outcome would deny us. This willingness to win or lose moves us out of an adversarial relationship to life and into a powerful kind of openness. From such a position we can make a greater commitment to life. Not only pleasant life or comfortable life, or our idea of life, but all life. Joy seems more closely related to aliveness than to happiness.

Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom

Learning from nature in time of stress

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When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry, The Peace Of Wild Things

Allowing ourselves be surprised …

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In this poem e.e Cummings pushes  the English language in an attempt to capture the life he feels, so much so that the words almost seem to have difficulty fitting in. He sees the vibrancy of growth and life all around in nature and expresses this in lines which rush from one  into the next. The last two lines well express the richness that we feel when we start to pay greater attention to all the things which surround us each day.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any – lifted from the no
of all nothing – human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

e.e.cummings

Sunday Quote: Joy

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If you start looking at life with joy,

sadness starts disappearing.

You cannot have heaven and hell together,

you can have only one.

It is your choice.

Osho