Everyone alive has suffered. It is the wisdom gained from our wounds and from our own experiences of suffering that makes us able to heal. Becoming expert has turned out to be less important than remembering and trusting the wholeness in myself and everyone else. Expertise cures, but wounded people can best be healed by other wounded people. Only other wounded people can understand what is needed, for the healing of suffering is compassion, not expertise.
Rachel Naomi Remen
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments,
but what is woven into the lives of others.
Pericles
Had some lovely visitors to the garden this morning, as an adult wagtail fed its chicks, probably not long out of the nest. The young ones followed the adult, waiting for food and running across the grass when they saw some being offered. We do not normally get wagtails visiting the garden, even allowing for the fact that they keep a low profile when nesting. However, this year we are extremely lucky with the amount of birds we see, especially the blackbirds who are nesting in the trees at the end of the garden. After the thunderstorms of the past two days they love to fill the air with song.
The instinctive tenderness of the adult’s care for the chick was very moving. It seems to me that, when we are not afraid, we have a natural movement of kindness and compassion towards others. It is only when fear enters into the equation that we withdraw and hold back, and our natural desire for caring connection is blocked and gets confused. At some level, even though we may not be aware of it, this causes a division within, some kind of cognitive dissonance and we deal with this by blaming the other or by justifying ourselves. These stories simply mean that we stay cut off from our deep self and from others, ensuring that we will never be fully happy as most of the energy from that part of our life or our history goes into splitting and withdrawal rather than into kindness.
Mindfulness practice is about cultivating a space in our minds and a harmony with our inner capacity for compassion. This means noticing when the mind is fearful or defensive. When we see this it is a good practice is to focus on the warmth of our own kindness and direct it first and foremost towards ourselves. We need to have the same tenderness that the mother bird demonstrated this morning towards the hungry, weak and frightened parts of our own heart. In this way we gradually find strength not to automatically run away from the fear when it arises. We can let go of what we carry within and relax in the more natural condition of love and trust.
The only reason we don’t open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don’t feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else’s eyes.
Pema Chodron
It’s in relationships that our unresolved psychological issues show up most intensely. That’s because psychological wounds are always relational — they form in and through our relationships with our early caretakers. The core psychological wound, so prevalent in the modern world, forms out of not feeling loved or intrinsically lovable as we are. Inadequate love or attunement is shocking and traumatic for a child’s developing and highly sensitive nervous system. It damages our capacity to value ourselves, which is also the basis for valuing others. I call this the “relational wound“ or “wound of the heart.”
There is a whole body of study and research showing how close bonding and loving attunement — what is known as “secure attachment”— have powerful impacts on every aspect of human development. Secure attachment has a tremendous effect on many dimensions of our health, wellbeing, and capacity to function effectively in the world: how our brains form, how well our endocrine and immune systems function, how we handle emotions, how subject we are to depression, how our nervous system functions and handles stress, and how we relate to others.
John Welwood
We are always in a perpetual state of being created and creating ourselves. We will never be the same, and we have never been quite the way we are right in this moment. This emergence of being as we flow from state to state is characterized by an underlying sense that there is an incredible amount of freedom and cohesion within the system in a given moment. As a person’s states of mind emerge in ways determined by the systems own constraints and by the external constraints of interpersonal connections with others, the self is perpetually being created
Dan Siegel, The Developing Mind; How Relationships and the Brain interact to Shape who we are
All the suffering in the world comes from seeking pleasure for oneself.
All the happiness in the world comes from seeking pleasure for others.
Shantideva
Mindfulbalance 