The essence of practice is always the same:
instead of falling prey to a chain reaction
of revenge or hatred,
we gradually learn to catch the emotional reaction
and drop the story lines.
Pema Chodron
Tag: Joy
Protection schemes
It’s important to recognize that all the emotional and psychological wounding we carry with us from the past is relational in nature: It has to do with not feeling fully loved. And it happened in our earliest relationships — with our caretakers — when our brain and body were totally soft and impressionable. As a result, the ego’s relational patterns have largely developed as protection schemes to insulate us from the vulnerable openness that love entails. In relationship the ego acts as a survival mechanism for getting needs met while fending off the threat of being hurt, manipulated, controlled, rejected, or abandoned in ways we were as a child. This is normal and totally understandable. Yet if it’s the main tenor of a relationship, it keeps us locked into complex strategies of defensiveness and control that undermine the possibility of deeper connection. Thus to gain greater access to the gold of our nature in relationship, a certain alchemy is required: the refining of our conditioned defensive patterns.
John Welwood, Intimate Relationship as a Spiritual Crucible
Not depending on something else to make us happy
In Tibet they have a saying, “The joy of a king is no greater than the joy of a beggar”. It isn’t what we possess — it’s what we enjoy. This means the experience of genuine cheerfulness cannot be bought or sold. What makes it genuinely cheerful is that we are free from fixation and attachment. We are free of having to depend on something else to make us happy. We can bask freely in the natural radiance of our mind. This is the equanimity of true cheerfulness — nothing more, nothing less.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, The Power of Being Cheerful
The one who knows
Every time I reacted negatively, pushing things away, that action implied that there was something to fear. That this feeling or this thought was dangerous; that it was going to really hurt me, or invade me; that it was something that was really me and mine. As I began to welcome it all I realised that when you accept everything, only then can you sense that, after all, there is nothing to fear. None of it really belongs to a self or comes from a self. It cannot touch the mind which knows, cannot affect its nature. Whatever shape of vessel you pour the water into, with this same total accommodation, the water changes to the shape of the bottle. It doesn’t say: ‘I will not be poured into a square bottle, square bottles are not my scene. Round bottles only, please!’ When there is complete acceptance, there is just the sense of being the knowing, being that which is aware of all that comes through the mind.
Ajahn Amaro
Staying with where our life is at this moment
Consciously or unconsciously,
we avoid facing things as they are in themselves
and so we want God to open for us a door which is beyond…
(But) to find life’s purpose we must go through the door of ourselves.
Krishnamurti
The key to contentment
A man is satisfied not by the quantity of food, but by the absence of greed. Gurdjieff
We suffer, often unknowingly, from wanting to be in two places at once, from wanting to experience more than one person can. Feeling like we are missing something or that we’re being left out, we want it all. But being human we can’t have it all. The tension of all this can lead to an insatiable search, where our passion for life is stirred, but never satisfied. When caught in this mindset, no amount of travel is enough, no amount of love is enough, no amount of success is enough.
I am not saying that we shouldn’t explore our curiosity and venture into the unknown. What I’m referring to here is that seed of lack that makes us feel insufficient, and then somehow, to compensate, we start to race through life with one eye on what we have and one eye on what we don’t….When we believe we are behind or less than, we somehow start to want more than we need, as if what we don’t have will fill in our pain and make us feel whole, as if the thing we have not tasted will be the thing to bring us alive. The truth is that one experience taken to heart will satisfy our hunger to be loved by everyone.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
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