Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Learning
Tag: impermanence
Not written in stone
When we practice meditation …. we are instructed to look at ourselves as directly as possible. My own experience tells me that when I look into my mirror, into my biography, the set of stories that I tell myself to explain who I am to myself, I can find all kinds of terrible things: some of them done to me, some done by me. I can use these elements to judge myself and others harshly. On the other side, I tend to ignore all the evidence from my memories of my past when I behaved or was treated in a loving and helpful way.
But whether we call the remembered events that constitute our personal biography horrible or wonderful, the incessant judgment of the self is a habit that leads nowhere. Instead, the instruction, again and again, is to see through the self as some kind of permanent object, something to be judged or loved, and to see how the elements of the self are actually constructions. True freedom, alignment with reality, comes from seeing through the self-construction, not abandoning it, but not treating it like something inscribed in stone either.
Melissa Myozen Blacker, from her blog firefly hall
No complaints
The weather is unusually disturbed and cold for this time of year, hailstones and frost….
As soon as the snow melts the grass begins to grow.
Even though the daytime high is barely above freezing, even
though May is very like November, marsh marigolds bloom
in the swamp and the popple trees produce a faint green
that hangs under the low clouds like a haze over the valley.
This is the way the saints live, no complaints, no suspicion,
no surprise.
If it rains, carry an umbrella, if it’s cold, wear
a jacket.
Louis Jenkins, American poet, 1942 -2019, Saints
Treasure underneath
A difficult practice these days…
Patience is a hard discipline. It is not just waiting until something happens over which we have no control: the arrival of the bus, the end of the rain, the return of a friend, the resolution of a conflict. Patience is not waiting passively until someone else does something.
Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient, we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later, and somewhere else. Be patient and trust that the treasure you are looking for is hidden in the ground on which you stand.
Henri Nouwen, Hidden Treasure
An experience of emptiness
Each chapter of the Bhagavad Gita concerns a particular yoga. This first chapter is called “the yoga of Arjuna’s despair” and it is significant that the experience of despair is a yoga; despair is often the first step on the path of spiritual life. It is very important to go through the experience of emptiness, of disillusion and despair. Many people do not awaken to the reality of God, and to the experience of transformation in their lives, until they reach the point of despair.
Bede Griffith, River of Compassion
One wave at a time
True religious teaching is not a denial of our day-to-day predicaments; it is not cleverly glossing over reality, or feigning happiness. On the contrary, true religious teaching has to be able to show us how we can swim through one wave at a time— that is, those waves of laughter, tears, prosperity, or adversity.
Daitsu Tom Wright and Jisho Warner, Laughter Through the Tears: Kosho Uchiyama Roshi on Life as a Zen Beggar
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