The trick is not how much pain you feel – but how much joy you feel.
Any idiot can feel pain.
Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.
Erica Jong
Tag: Life
Splitting, blaming, doesn’t help
If we think of suffering as something unnatural, something that we shouldn’t be experiencing, then it’s not much of a leap to begin to look for someone to blame for our suffering. If I’m unhappy, then I must be the victim of someone or something – an idea that’s all too common in the West. The victimizer may be the government, the educational system, abusive parents, a ‘dysfunctional family,’ the other gender or our uncaring mate. Or, we may turn the blame inward: there’s something wrong with me, I’m the victim of disease, of defective genes perhaps. But the risk of continuing to focus on assigning blame, and maintaining a victim stance, is the perpetuation of our suffering – with persistent feelings of anger, frustration, and resentment.
Dalai Lama
They never stay
The bad weather this past week has meant that the blossoms on the cherry tree in the garden have all been blown away. Cherry blossoms have long been a symbol for transience and the the ephemeral nature of life, so I suppose they are even more so this year:
Nothing in the world
is usual today.
This is the first morning.
Come quickly – as soon as
these blossoms open, they fall.
This world exists as a sheen of dew on flowers.
Izumi Shikibu, 10th Century Japanese poetess.
We usually take ourselves to be the sum of these thoughts, ideas, emotions and body sensations, but there is nothing solid to them. How can we claim to be our thoughts or opinions or emotions or body when they never stay the same?
Jack Kornfield
When we are unhappy
As I have written before, Jacques Lusseyran was a French writer who took part in the Resistance against the German Occupation, and he continued to organize groups against the Nazis even after he was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. His work was all the more striking because he was totally blind from the age of 8, following an accident at school. His experiences give him a certain authority when it comes to reflections on what makes for contentment or unhappiness:
Unhappiness, I saw then, comes to each of us because we think ourselves at the center of the world, because we have the miserable conviction that we alone suffer to the point of unbearable intensity. Unhappiness is always to feel oneself imprisoned in one’s own skin, in one’s own brain.
Jacques Lusseyran.
Why difficulties are necessary
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
Where joy comes from
Joy seems to be part of an unconditional wish to live, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences or expectations. Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole and to show up and meet with whatever is there. It has a kind of invincibility that attachment to any particular outcome would deny us. This willingness to win or lose moves us out of an adversarial relationship to life and into a powerful kind of openness. From such a position we can make a greater commitment to life. Not only pleasant life or comfortable life, or our idea of life, but all life. Joy seems more closely related to aliveness than to happiness.
Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom
