The meditation orientation is not about fixing pain or making it better. It’s about looking deeply into the nature of pain — making use of it in certain ways that might allow us to grow. In that growing, things will change, and we have the potential to make choices that will move us toward greater wisdom and compassion, including self-compassion, and thus toward freedom from suffering.
Jon Kabat Zinn, At Home in our Bodies
There are journeys we have begun that have brought us great inner riches and refinement; but we had to travel through dark valleys of difficulty and suffering. Had we known at the beginning what the journey would demand of us, we might never have set out. Yet the rewards and gifts became vital to who we are. Through the innocence of beginning we are often seduced into growth.… When the heart is ready for a fresh beginning, unforeseen things can emerge. And in a sense, this is exactly what a beginning does. It is an opening for surprises. Surrounding the intention and the act of beginning, there are always exciting possibilities. … beginnings have their own mind, and they invite and unveil new gifts and arrivals in one’s life. Beginnings are new horizons that want to be seen; … What is the new horizon in you that wants to be seen?
John O Donohue
No matter how much we want it to be otherwise, the truth is that we are not in control of the unfolding of our experiences. Despite our search for stability and prediction, for the center of our loves to hold firm, it never does. Life is wilder than that, a flow we cannot command or stave off. We can affect and influence and impact what happens, but we can’t wake up in the morning and decide what we will encounter and feel and be confronted ny during the day. Invariably, when I finally think that I have gotten one aspect of myself under control, life intrudes forcefully to show me otherwise.
Sharon Slazberg, Faith
Dance in the body you have.
Agnes de Mille
Mindfulness gives you time. Time gives you choices. Choices, skillfully made, lead to freedom. You don’t have to be swept away by your feeling. You can respond with wisdom and kindness rather than habit and reactivity.
Bhante H Gunaratana
Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of the Christian season of Lent, a period of simplification and fasting. Just as this morning’s saying simplified practice down to its very basic, this whole season encourages us to reflect on all the different inputs which come into the Body-Mind, not just those in the form of food:
The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible… Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting.
Alian de Botton
Most people today seems to think that sacrifice means giving something up. This is how shallow our religious sense has become. Sacrifice really involves the art of drawing energy from one level and reinvesting it at another level to produce a higher form of consciousness.
Robert Johnson, Jungian Analyst
