Tag: Meditation

Over-identification

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Basically, all emotions are modifications of one primordial, undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the loss of awareness of who you are,  beyond name and form. Because of its undifferentiated nature, it is hard to find a name that precisely describes this emotion. ‘Fear’ comes close, but apart from a continuous sense of threat, it also includes a deep sense of abandonment and incompleteness. It may be best to use a term that is as undifferentiated as that basic emotion and simply call it ‘pain.’

One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove that emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain.  You will not be free of that pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from identification with the mind, which is to say from ego. The mind is then toppled from its place of power and Being reveals itself as your true nature.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

What’s our focus

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If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live.

If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.

Thomas Merton, Love and Living

Complaint

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Anxiety, heartbreak, and tenderness mark the in-between state. It’s the kind of place we usually want to avoid. The challenge is to stay in the middle rather than buy into struggle and complaint. The challenge is to let it soften us rather than make us more rigid and afraid.

Pema Chodron

Our relationship to what is

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No matter how much we like or dislike, or are hurt or maimed by a thought, action or event, our attitudes do not colour the event itself, only our relationship to it.

As this is so, no matter how much we stomp or shout or cajole or whine, reality is what it is. In this is sacredness and dignity.

Ven. Anzan Hoshin roshi, Cutting the Cat Into One: the Practice of the Bodhisattva Precepts

The strength to survive

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In the light of all that is happening this year and this week, we all need to keep our hopes alive

There is an Ethiopian legend about a shepherd  boy Alemayu that speaks to me of the power of hope. Alemayu had to spend the night on a bitterly cold mountain. He had only a very thin cloth to wear. To the amazement of all the villagers, he returned alive and well. When they asked him how he survived, he replied: ” ‘The night was bitter. When all the sky was dark, I thought I would die. Then far, far off I saw a shepherd’s fire on another mountain. I kept my eyes on the red glow in the distance, and I dreamed of being warm. And that is how I had the strength to survive.

Each one of us has a  “shepherd’s fire on another mountain” that has kept our hope alive.  This fire has given us the courage to recover our lost self and believe in the dreams that stir in our soul.

Joyce Rupp, Dear Heart, Come Home

We are lost

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It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Wendell Berry