Ajahn Sumedho advises: ‘Don’t take your life personally.’
That sounds disorienting, and it is: but what replaces the solid isolated self is respect for the sensitivity and clarity with respect to the boundless heart – that we all can have access to. This sense, this awakening to citta, can widen one’s cosmos and give it balance: my feelings, my rights, my time, and my opinions have to be felt through the heart, but they don’t have to be such an exclusive concern.
Ajahn Sucitto
Emotions are not solid entities.
They are events that arise, manifest, and pass away.
When we observe them with mindfulness, we see that they are just energies in the mind, conditioned by various factors.
They don’t belong to us; they simply flow through us.
Joseph Goldstein, Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening
In time, we start to notice how all experience arises and passes away – sensations, emotions, even our sense of self. We see that nothing is solid or permanent. A thought comes, and we recognize it as just a thought, not a command or an absolute truth. A feeling of anger arises, and instead of being consumed by it, we see it as a passing energy in the body and mind.
This is where true freedom lies – not in controlling experience, but in being with it fully, without identification. Awareness is like the sky: thoughts and emotions are like clouds that drift through. The sky doesn’t hold onto them or resist them; it simply allows them to come and go.
Larry Rosenberg, Breath by Breath: The Liberating Practice of Insight Meditation
Everything that arises passes away.
This is not a pessimistic truth, but a liberating one –
when we stop demanding permanence from a world that cannot provide it, we find peace.
Andrew Olendzki, Unlimiting Mind: The Radically Experiential Psychology of Buddhism
Every walk is a protest against the idea that speed and efficiency are the only measures of a life.
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust
What does seeking look like?
If it seeks an external object, we focus our attention on becoming something. We look for something pleasant or unpleasant to focus our attention on, to generate a view or an opinion about, to generate a sense of importance around the sense of “I,” “me,” and “mine.” Or, the becoming mind seeks an internal object, a subjective sense of “me” being something, me being a success, me being a failure, or at least me being somebody. But all of this – internal or external—is in the
realm of becoming.
We need to able to let go of the fear of letting go, the fear of not being something, not getting what one wants, not being what one thinks one should be or would like to be or have to be, have to get, have to become. There’s a tremendous, almost primal fear, of actually being peaceful, of really letting go, of putting stuff down, of putting identity down, of putting the compulsions down. We want to be able to watch the fear, to see it, and to identify it, to know “that is the source of suffering” the becoming towards, the pull towards becoming and being.
Ajahn Passano, On Becoming and Stopping
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