If you’re really listening, if you’re awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonders. … [click on title to read and view more]
“You quickly learn that distractions are not just phone calls and emails. Our own mind and our longings, our cravings and our fantasies are also major distractions,” Chödrön says.
“The best in that spiritual instruction is when you wake up in the morning and you say ‘I wonder what’s going to happen today?’ and then carry that kind of curiosity through your life,” Chödrön says. … [click on title for the rest of the post]
When you’re like a keg of dynamite just about to go off, patience means just slowing down at that point—just pausing—instead of immediately acting on your usual, habitual response. You refrain from acting, you stop talking to yourself, and then you connect with the soft spot. But at the same time you are completely and totally honest with yourself about what you are feeling… … [click on title for the rest of the post]
Well, basically, we cannot ever really know what is happening, but, yeah:
You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith, and hope. … [click on title for the rest of the post]
Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people who are in our lives.
Dream: I am driving down a steep and wet mountain road. I slip off at a curve off a cliff into free-fall thousands of feet above ground. As I catapult downward, while still at the wheel of my car, I wonder if there is any way I might survive.
We are all free-falling to our death: Pema Chödrön, along with her teacher Chögyam Trungpa speak of this as the groundlessness of our existence. … [click on title for the rest of the post]
I try to practice what I preach; I’m not always that good at it but I really do try. The other night, I was getting hard-hearted, closed-minded, and fundamentalist about somebody else, and I remembered this expression that you can never hate somebody if you stand in their shoes. I was angry at him because he was holding such a rigid view. In that instant I was able to put myself in his shoes and I realized, “I’m just as riled up, and self-righteous and closed-minded about this as he is. We’re in exactly the same place!” And I saw that the more I held on to my view, the more polarized we would become, and the more we’d be just mirror images of one another—two people with closed minds and hard hearts who both think they’re right, screaming at each other. It changed for me when I saw it from his side, and I was able to see my own aggression and ridiculousness. … [click on title for the rest of the post]
The essence of samsara is this tendency that we have to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to seek security and avoid groundlessness, to seek comfort and avoid discomfort. The basic teaching is that that is how we keep ourselves miserable, unhappy, and stuck in a very small, limited view of reality. … [click on title for the rest of the post]
There is the solitude of suffering, when you go through darkness that is lonely, intense, and terrible. Words become powerless to express your pain; what others hear from your words is so distant and different from what you are actually suffering … [click on title for the rest of the post]
Last night I listened to a dharma talk from the retreat on bodhicitta. I like how she calls it the soft-spot. It’s a willingness to live in the soft-spot. Another way to consider the soft-spot is to be willing to live from the middle of our pain and our joy. To surrender to the complete depth of life. Much of my suffering, it’s becoming clear (and I mean both physical and emotional) has been a resistance to embracing pain. Once we embrace pain our capacity for joy also increases. And embracing pain means understanding the nature of all of humanity. It allows us to grow our empathy and compassion for all sentient beings and the planet too, our home. … [click on title for the rest of the post]
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