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
Tag: Life
Standing still and withdrawing your consent to fear
In our practice we cultivate awareness – the capacity to hold even the events and thoughts and fears that bother us with kindness and non-judgment. This means, as Christine Feldman tells us here, that we create enough of a gap between us and our fears that we no longer allow them to define our sense of self, or let them mean that we are doing something wrong:
It is a great relief to stop running from pain. In standing still and receiving life with all its adversity and sorrow, you have withdrawn your permission for suffering to define your life. You have also withdrawn your consent to living in fear. Something profound happens in your heart when you turn with kindness toward all the circumstances of pain which you have previously repressed, dismissed or fled from. There is a softening, an opening, a deepening capacity and willingness to understand sorrow and its cause. You come to understand that your willingness to be present with difficulties is the midwife to compassion.
Christine Feldman, Compassion
Working with difficulties – not looking for resolution
Patience is a way to de-escalate aggression and its accompanying pain. This is to say that when we’re feeling aggressive — and I think this would go for any strong emotion — there’s a seductive quality that pulls us in the direction of wanting to get some resolution. We feel restless, agitated, ill at ease. It hurts so much to feel the aggression that we want it to be resolved. Right then we could change the way we look at this discomfort and practice patience.
Pema Chodron
Just show up
I sometimes say that our monastery in Santa Fe should have a slogan hanging over the gate “Show up”. That’s all we have to do when we meditate – show up. We bring ourselves and all of our thoughts and feelings to the practice of being with whatever is, whether we are tired, angry, fearful, grieving or just plain resistant and unwilling. It really doesn’t matter what we’re feeling; we just come and sit down.
However unbearable any discomfort seems, ultimately everything we experience is temporary. And please make the wonderful effort to show up for your life, every moment, this moment – because it is perfect, just as it is.
Joan Halifax, Being with Dying
Holding the parts of our life together
The current understanding of work-life balance is too simplistic. People find it hard to balance work with family, family with self, because it might not be a question of balance. Some other dynamic is at play, something to do with a very human attempt at happiness that does not quantify different parts of life and often set them against one another. We are collectively exhausted because of our inability to hold competing parts of ourselves together in a more integrated way. These hidden human dynamics of integration are more of a conversation, more of a synthesis and more of an almost religious and sometimes delirious quest for meaning than a simple attempt at daily ease and contentment.
David Whyte, The Three Marriages: Reimagining work, self and Relationship
We like to find someone, something to blame
When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look into the reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or our family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like lettuce.
Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and arguments. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.
Thich Nhat Hahn
