It’s important to be heroic, ambitious, productive, efficient, creative, and progressive, but these qualities don’t necessarily nurture the soul. The soul has different concerns, of equal value: downtime for reflection, conversation, and reverie; beauty that is captivating and pleasuring; relatedness to the environs and to people; and any animal’s rhythm of rest and activity.
Thomas Moore
Happiness is not to be found through great effort and willpower.
It is already present in open relaxation and letting go.
Don’t strain.
There’s nothing to do or to undo. Whatever momentarily arises in body–mind has no real import at all, has very little reality whatsoever.
Why identify with it and become attached to it, passing judgment on it and on yourself and others?
Far better simply to let the entire play just happen on its own,
Springing up and falling back again like waves
Without ‘rectifying’ things or manipulating things.
Just noticing how everything vanishes and then magically reappears, again and again and again. Time without end.
It’s only our searching for happiness that prevents us from seeing it.
Lama Gendun Rinpoche, Free and Easy
The real goal of a depth therapy is not a “cure”, for the human condition is not a disease. Yes, real, resistant problems of daily life can and must be addressed and the resources of consciousness brought fully to bear on their resolution. But the real gift of a depth therapy, or of any truly considered life, is that one achieves a deepened conversation around the meaning of one’s journey – a conversation without which one lives a received life, not one’s own, a superficial life, or a life in service to complexes or ideologies.
James Hollis, What Matter most: Living a more considered Life
We are so close to our thoughts, including the negative ones, that we frequently simply accept them as the truth, and in that way allow them determine how we act in certain moments. Practice allows us to not give as much substance to our thoughts and to see them simply as one of the many energies that pass through the mind. It is said that the Dalai Lama was amazed to hear that people in the West suffered from poor self-esteem or self-hatred, and replied that such a stance was not one he was familiar with. In this light it is interesting to see how this meditation teacher describes self- critical or attributional thoughts as “lazy”, hinting that there are better ways of working with the mind:
There is the laziness of feeling ourselves unworthy, the laziness of thinking, “I can’t do this. Other people can meditate, other people can be mindful, other people can be kind and generous in difficult situations, but I can’t, because I’m too stupid.” Or, alternatively, “I’m always an angry person;” “I’ve never been able to do anything in my life;” “I’ve always failed, and I’m bound to fail.”
Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
Had a conversation this week which reminded me that not everything works out the way that we anticipate or wish. Life rarely proceeds so smoothly that we maintain the pure clarity or carefree existence which we glimpsed at times when we were children. It is much more complex – a succession of ebbs and flows, of good moments and bad, of integrity and mixed motives. In later life, the challenge is more that we reconcile the opposites that have emerged within us – the Shadow and the light, the steps forward with the setbacks – and transform them into a wholeness which allows us fully move on in the project which is our life. At times, however, it can be hard to see a positive direction in where we currently are, as the maps and guidelines which had guided us up to now seem hopelessly inadequate. A new paradigm is needed. We are forced to acknowledge the mystery and work out a path on our own, moving into a larger life and not the one we unconsciously thought had been mapped out for us.
Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started!
And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.
Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.
Mary Oliver, Halleluiah.
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 lives to hold firm, it never does. Life is wilder than that – a flow that 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 by during the day.
Sharon Salzberg, Faith.
