Our physical space may be more restricted, but our hearts can still dance
May my ashes, when you have them, friend,
and give them to the ocean
leap in the froth of the waves,
still loving the moment,
still ready, beyond all else,
to dance for the world.
Mary Oliver, Prayer
Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength
August Wilson, 1945 – 2005, American Pulitzer Prize winning playwright
You deal with your shit in Zen by sitting with it. By breathing right into it. You don’t try and ignore it with pleasant thoughts or lofty ideas, and you don’t try and bury it with solutions.
You deal with it, you work with it, one breath at a time.
Gento Steve Krieger, Head monk Rinzai-ji Zen Center, Los Angeles, Growing Ground
One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
Freud, Letter to Jung, 1907
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
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
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