We often ask, “What’s wrong?” Doing so we invite painful seeds of sorrow to come up and manifest. We feel suffering, anger and depression and produce more such seeds. We would be much happier if we tried to stay in touch with the healthy, joyful seeds inside of us and around us. We should learn to ask “What is not wrong?” and be in touch with that.
Thich Nhat Hahn, Peace is Every Step
Mindfulness practice help us become aware of the gaps and discontinuities that are always appearing spontaneously in the logic of our story lines. For instance even in in the midst of the most intense anger, we might begin to notice flashes of “Why am I so angry?” “Do I need to make such a big deal out of this?” “Is this really as important as I am making it?” Meditation allows us to notice how big mind is always available and flashing into awareness, even when we are most caught up in our stories. Although we often feel most alive when involved in emotional dramas, mediatatio nhelp us realize our baisc ongoing aliveness that is always present in both dramatic and undramatic moments
John Welwood, Befriending Emotion
I discovered the secret of the sea
in meditation upon the dew drop.
Kahil Gibran
The human person is a threshold where many infinities meet. There is the infinity of space that reaches out into the depths of the cosmos; the infinity of time reaching back over billions of years. …. A world lies hidden behind each human face. In some faces the vulnerability of inner exposure to these depths becomes visible. When you look at some faces, you can see the turbulence of the infinite beginning to gather to the surface. this moment can open in a gaze from a stranger, or in a conversation with someone you know well. Suddenly, without their intending it or being conscious of it, their gaze becomes the vehicle of some primal inner presence. This gaze lasts for only a second. In that slightest interim something more than the person looks out. Another infinity as yet unborn, is dimly present. you feel that you are being looked at from the strangeness of the eternal. The infinity gazing out at you is from an ancient time. We cannot seal off the eternal. Unexpectedly and disturbingly, it gazes in at us through the sudden apertures in our patterned lives. A friend, who loves lace, often says that it is the holes in lace that render it beautiful. Our experience has this lace structure…..
John O’Donohue, Anam Chara
We already have everything we need. All these trips that we lay on ourselves–the heavy-duty fearing that we’re bad and hoping that we’re good, the identities that we so dearly cling to, – never touch our basic wealth. They are like clouds that temporarily block the sun. But all the time our warmth and brilliance are right here. This is who we really are.
Pema Chodron
Normally we do everything we can to avoid just being. When left alone with ourselves, without a project to occupy us, we become nervous. We start judging ourselves or thinking about what we should be doing or feeling. We start putting conditions on ourselves, trying to arrange our experience so that it measures up to our inner standards. Since this inner struggle is so painful, we are always looking for something to distract us from being with ourselves.
In meditation practice, you work directly with your confused mind-states, without waging crusades against any aspect of your experience. You let all your tendencies arise, without trying to screen anything out, manipulate experience in any way, or measure up to any ideal standard. Allowing yourself the space to be as you are — letting whatever arises arise, without fixation on it, and coming back to simple presence — this is perhaps the most loving and compassionate way you can treat yourself. It helps you make friends with the whole range of your experience.
John Welwood
