Perhaps the real point of life is simply to wear us down until we have no choice but to start abandoning our defenses. We learn that the way things are is simply the way they are meant to be right now, and then, suddenly, at long last, we catch a glimpse of the abundance in the moment.
Katrina Kenison, Magical Journey, An Apprenticeship in Contentment
If you’re human, you experience anxiety. The choice is whether to experience anxiety in the service of neurosis or in the service of waking up….We can invest in denying the truth of our vulnerabilities, thereby gaining pseudo-security at the cost of chronic anxiety. Or we can commit to experiencing our vulnerabilities moment by moment, gaining confidence that we can work with whatever arises- anxiety, fear, anger, sadness, etc. Either way, there’s anxiety. Own the embodied intensity as a valid part of your life and be kind to this experience.
Bruce Tift, Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation
All life worth living is difficult, nobody promised us happiness;
it is not a commodity you have earned, or shall ever earn.
It is a by-product of brave living, and it never comes in the form we expect, or at the season we hoped for, or as the result of our planning for it.
Katherine Anne Porter 1890 – 1980, American journalist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist.
When we seek happiness through accumulation, either outside of ourselves – from other people, relationships, or material goods – or from our own self-development, we are missing the essential point. In either case we are trying to find completion. But according to Buddhism, such a strategy is doomed.
Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.
Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness
A lovely image of joy in the midst of the changing currents of life
On a branch
floating downriver
a cricket, singing.
Issa, Japanese Buddhist poet, 1763-1827
One of the sad things today is that so many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. They are dying to tie themselves into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined identity that other people have actually settled on for them. This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies that are rising inside in their souls. Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise. We settle for something that is safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts. A man in Connemara said one time to a friend of mine, ‘Beidh muid sínte siar cúig mhilliúin blain déag faoin chré’ – “We’ll be lying down in the earth for about fifteen million years” – and we have a short exposure. I feel that when you recognize that death is on its way, it is a great liberation, because it means that you can in some way feel the call to live everything that is within you. One of the greatest sins is the unlived life, not to allow yourself to become chief executive of the project you call your life, to have a reverence always for the immensity that is inside of you.
John O Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
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