One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
Freud, Letter to Jung, 1907
Tag: impermanence
Peace of mind is possible
Life is difficult, the Buddha taught, for everyone. Suffering, he said, is the demand that experience be different than what it is. Of course, we do what we can to address pain. Sometimes illnesses are cured. Sometimes relationships are mended. Sometimes losses are recouped. Sometimes, though, nothing can be done. The Buddha’s teaching of liberation was that peace of mind is possible, no matter what the circumstances.
Sylvia Boorstein, It’s All Happening to All of us, All of the Time
Sunday Quote: No feeling is final
Let everything happen to you.
Beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final .
Rilke
Interruptions
The Tibetan term bardo, or “intermediate state,” is not just a reference to the afterlife. It also refers more generally to these moments when gaps appear, interrupting the continuity that we otherwise project onto our lives….we sometimes refer to this as having the rug pulled out from under us, or feeling un-grounded. These interruptions in our normal sense of certainty are what is being referred to by the term bardo.
But to be precise, bardo refers to that state in which we have lost our old reality and it is no longer available to us….In those moments, we lose our grip on the old reality and yet have no sense what a new one might be like. There is no ground, no certainty, and no reference point — there is, in a sense, no rest. This has always been the entry point in our lives for religion, because in that radical state of unreality we need profound reasoning — not just logic, but something beyond logic, something that speaks to us in a timeless, non-conceptual way. Milarepa referred to this disruption as a great marvel, singing from his cave, “The precious pot containing my riches becomes my teacher in the very moment it breaks.”
Pema Khnsdro Rinpoche, Breaking Open in the Bardo
Nothing is static or fixed
The lives of all beings are marked by three characteristics: impermanence, egolessness and suffering or dissatisfaction. Recognizing these qualities to be real and true in our experience helps us relax with things as they are. The first mark is impermanence. That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and changing, is the first mark of existence. We dont have to be mystics or physicists to know this. Yet at the level of personal experience, we resist this basic fact. It means that life is not always going to go our way. It means there’s loss as well as gain. and we don’t like that.
Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty
Our schedules….
I wake clear and rested, light flooding my room. The day seems endless and free.
But making coffee, I notice three bills I haven’t paid and after showering I notice I need a haircut, and since I’ll be out that way, I think I might as well pick up my shirts. But I so want to spend time in the sun. So I think, well, after these errands, I’ll go to the park, and then I deliberate which park will be just right and decide on one forty minutes away. Finally, wanting to make sure there is some fun in all of this, I call a friend and plan to meet her at a movie at six.
Now I have to hurry along to make sure I can get everywhere on time. But, thankfully, while gassing up, I hear a small bird and lift my head just as a cloud opens and the light floods my mind, and I drop all my plans like change on the ground.
I laugh at myself. I can so easily become a slave to a schedule I create.
Not one of these things is necessary today. I drop everything and follow the bird.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
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