Without darkness, Nothing comes to birth, As without light, Nothing flowers.
May Sarton
It has taken me a long time to recognize that darkness is an essential element for personal growth. No matter how many ‘right things.’ I do, darkness will still come unannounced and uninvited because it is an essential part of life. Without darkness I cannot become the person I was meant to be.
Joyce Rupp, Little Pieces of Light
Meditation is a way of training in learning to stay, or as one student put it more accurately, learning to come back, to return to being present over and over again.
The truth is, anyone who’s ever tried meditation learns really quickly that we are almost never fully present.
Pema Chodron
One of the problems of contemporary culture is that life moves at such a quick pace, we usually don’t give ourselves time to feel and listen deeply. You may have to take deliberate action to nurture the soul. If you want to increase your soul’s bank account, you may have to seek out the unfamiliar and do things that at first could feel uncomfortable. Give yourself time as you experiment. How will you know if you’re on the right track? I like Rumi’s counsel: ‘When you do something from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.
Elizabeth Lesser, The Seeker’s Guide: Making Your Life A Spiritual Adventure
Cells die every day. Paradoxically that is how the body lives……Likewise ways of thinking die like cells, and we suffer greatly when we refuse to allow what is growing underneath make its way as the new skin of our lives. It is the stubbornness with which we refuse to let what’s growing underneath come through that pains us. It is the fear that nothing is growing underneath that feeds our despair. It is the moment that we cease growing in any direction that is truly deadly.…Imagine if trees never shed their leaves, or if waves never turned over, or if clouds dumped their rain and disappeared.
I say this to remind myself as much as you: Little deaths prevent big deaths. What matters most is waiting its turn, underneath all that is expending itself to prepare the way.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
If you’re like me, so much of what we twirl around with in the mind is, frankly, a waste of time. It doesn’t solve a problem, prevent a bad thing from happening, or bring us to peace with others. And it’s deeply unnatural. As we evolved, our ancestors probably experienced more physical but less mental fatigue than most people today in the developed nations. Consequently, our bodies are adapted to weariness – but our minds are not. For a brief time – finals week, an intense month at work, a demanding year with a new baby – OK, sometimes we just have to crank the mind up into overdrive and tough it out. But as a way of life, it’s nuts.
We have to take a stand against the crazy mental busyness that has become the new normal. We’re bombarded with things to think about all day long, flooded with words and images to process, and forced to juggle unprecedented complexities. Our minds are being hauled along behind a culture without a speed limit – but the human body and brain does have a limit, a natural carrying capacity, and when we exceed it there’s always a price. It’s like being trapped in rush hour your whole life. Each time you know this, each time you pull out of the mental traffic, it’s an act of freedom and kindness and wisdom.
Rick Hanson.
The pebble reaches the bed of the river by the shortest path because it allows itself to fall without making any effort. During our sitting meditation we can allow ourselves to rest like a pebble. We can allow ourselves to sink naturally without effort to the position of sitting, the position of resting. Resting is a very important practice; we have to learn the art of resting. Resting is the first part of meditation. You should allow your body and your mind to rest. Our mind as well as our body needs to rest.
The problem is that not many of us know how to allow our body and mind to rest. We are always struggling; struggling has become a kind of habit. We cannot resist being active, struggling all the time. We struggle even during our sleep. It is very important to realize that we have the habit energy of struggling. We have to be able to recognize a habit when it manifests itself because if we know how to recognize our habit, it will lose its energy and will not be able to push us anymore.
Thich Nhat Hahn, Resting in the River
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