Every year, everything
I have ever learned in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Mary Oliver, In Blackwater Woods
The best chance to be whole
is to love whatever gets in the way,
until it ceases to be an obstacle.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
Gratitude welcomes what we are given. It doesn’t know any stories about how it should have been. To talk about gratitude is also to talk about what prevents gratitude, about resentment and bitterness. Resentment and bitterness are the residue that comes from dashed expectations. Since the world doesn’t fit our stories, there is a tension where I expected life to be more favorable to my hopes than it has been, or feel that the world has not bothered enough with me. That bitterness sticks in the body and the mind, so that the mind reruns its painful stories and the body stores them in awkwardness and discomfort.
John Tarrant, Practices of Gratitude.
Meditation comes alive through a growing capacity to release our habitual entanglement in the stories and plans, conflicts and worries that make up the small sense of self, and to rest in awareness. In meditation we do this simply by acknowledging the moment-to-moment changing conditions — the pleasure and pain, the praise and blame, the litany of ideas and expectations that arise. Without identifying with them, we can rest in the awareness itself, beyond conditions, and experience what my teacher Ajahn Chah called jai pongsai, our natural lightness of heart. Developing this capacity to rest in awareness nourishes samadhi (concentration), which stabilizes and clarifies the mind, and prajna (wisdom), that sees things as they are.
Jack Kornfield, A Mind like Sky: Wise Attention, Open Awareness.
In the face of the economic hardship the world is now suffering, it is possible for us to spin out and become very dualistic. When we are not sure what’s going on, we react with fear and start labeling things black or white, good or bad, doomed to fail or destined to succeed. The process of labeling something because we are not sure what it is further increases the illusion of duality. Dualistic mind creates an aggressive scenario because we project a “self” and “other,” and this process becomes a cycle: the heavier the dualism, the heavier the fear.
What virtues can we develop to overcome the fear that freezes life into a dualistic illusion? Gentleness is key in overcoming the aggression that results from the process of fixating. We’re living in a time when even within our own mind, it is difficult to find peace. We label many faults in ourselves; we become harsh with ourselves. When we’re unable to find peace with ourselves, it becomes difficult to find peace with each other. So we must begin to practice peace by being gentle with ourselves. When we are gentle with ourselves, we are naturally gentle with others.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, It’s Not Us and Them
Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for awhile.
Plain sailing is pleasant, but you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way.
David Whyte
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