Insights for March 2015
Integration. Seattle. Margaret Gervais
Awakening:
“Acceptance of the unacceptable is the greatest source of grace in this world.” Eckhart Tolle
"Your ego is a set of thoughts that define your universe. It’s like a familiar room built of thoughts; you see the universe through its windows. You are secure in it, but to the extent that you are afraid to venture outside, it has become a prison. Your ego has you conned. You believe you need its specific thoughts to survive. The ego controls you through your fear of loss of identity. To give up these thoughts, it seems, would annihilate you, and so you cling to them.There is an alternative. You needn’t destroy the ego to escape its tyranny. You can keep this familiar room to use as you wish, and you can be free to come and go. First you need to know that you are infinitely more than the ego room by which you define yourself. Once you know this, you have the power to change the ego from prison to home base." Ram Dass, Ram Dass, Love Serve Remember
“We only need to take the first step beyond all that we have known for reality to begin to unfold itself before us. We need to take that first step not once, but continually evermore.”Adyashanti
“No matter what identity we cling to, it takes great courage to step out of the old masks we wear and the old scripts that we live by, and open ourselves to the mysterious inner core of our being.
” Adyashanti Way of Liberating Insight Course, Adyashanti:
“As you awaken more to the truth of your being, you have a greater capacity to be present for more and more challenging experiences, and those experiences find a completion through you instead of getting stuck in you.With enlightened experience, when you experience something fully and deeply, it can run clean through you so that the next day or the next week, it’s gone.As your capacity to embody wider experience grows, your dark shadow experiences often come into the light of your awareness because they’re seeking to be embodied and therefore free. You cannot free anything that you're not willing to embody. To embody it means to be completely present for it.The resolution of unworthiness is not going from feeling unworthy to feeling worthy, but going from being hateful towards yourself to being kind, even kind toward your hateful self-dialogue -- those old violent, condemning voices in your mind that have become inherent.From your resource of Awareness, from the standpoint of peace, you can begin to acknowledge the turmoil that is there and be willing to experience it. How does our emotional life look from a dimension of consciousness that’s not caught in our emotional turmoil, but neither is it trying to avoid it?When you begin to tap into a compassion and kindness you would have for anybody having difficulty and begin to operate from that place, then you’re calling upon resources within yourself that you could never access before.How am I creating my own suffering right now? What am I thinking?” When you see some of the violent thoughts that are creating your destructive emotional experiences, you see that anyone would feel terrible who has those kinds of thoughts.How does kindness really see the old stories? How does kindness feel about your own feeling of unworthiness? Does it deny it, or does it understand it and move toward it?If you can't find this kindness and peace, think of anything that evokes a sense of kindness or appreciation in you. Once you’re in the atmosphere of it, look at how it relates to the darker aspect of your being, your sense of unworthiness.”
The Impact of Awakening, Adyashanti:“Those who are free don't want anything. They don't want anything from their mind, they don't want anything from their emotions, and they don't want anything from anyone, and they don't want anything from life. They don't want anything. If you don't want, all that's left is an incredible sense of being free.In one sense, the enlightened life is one of total insecurity; you live and act from the Unknown. We’re used to acting from the distorted sense of security that our mind provides, but freedom doesn’t operate that way. It’s a paradox. Precisely because you don’t know, and you know you don’t know, the door is wide open to know in each moment. That’s when you know - in each moment. By resting in not knowing, knowing becomes available.Having a profound awakening can be like taking the lid off of a jar. All the karma that has been repressed, all the karma at the bottom of our misery that we aren’t conscious of, comes flying out because there is finally space in which it can emerge. When it hits you in the face, you wonder where your freedom went and what went wrong. But understand that this is a consequence of the freedom; it is not a mistake. Everything wants to come up into and be transformed by the freedom. If you let it come up into this aware space, which is love, it will reharmonize. This space that you are is unconditional love. Unconditional means just that: everything is welcome’ nothing is cast away or set apart from it.”Adyashanti, Portland Satsang, March 20, 2015
“Don’t walk in my mind with your dirty feet.” Zen Master“Honor the question more than you honor the answers. Answers are not actually the answer to existential questions. No answer fully addresses the yearning within us. Every question arises out of answers.Spiritual realizations are the gaps in life coming to life.If it’s happening, it’s real. It’s the current reality.The way we see things today is just the way we see things today.Truth is a fluid thing. It’s part of life, which is fluid and dynamic.”“When you are ready, you'll completely face the fear of your own nonexistence. Only then does it become powerless. Until then it will seem so terrifying. What's disappearing into nonexistence is who you've imagined yourself to be. You can't do an end run around fear. You have to face it directly.” Adyashanti, Exploring the Teachings of Nisargadatta Maharaj“Each moment is a chance for us to make peace with the world.” Thich Nhat Hanh"The only way you can know the absolute is through a state of unknowing. You know it by unknowing it." Adyashanti
Meditation:"After you have practiced for a while, you will realize that it is not possible to make rapid, extraordinary progress. Even though you try very hard, the progress you make is always little by little." Shunryu Suzuki
"Though you can start meditation any time, it’s harder if your life is chaotic, if you’re feeling paranoid, if you’re overwhelmed with responsibilities, or if you’re sick. But even starting under these conditions, meditation will help you to clear things up a bit. Slowly you reorganize your life to support your spiritual journey. At each stage there will be something you can do to create a supportive space. It may mean changing your diet, who you’re with, how you spend your time, what’s on your walls, what books you read, what you fill your consciousness with, how you care for your body, or where and how you sit to meditate. All these factors contribute to the depth and freedom that you can know through meditation.You are under no pressure to rush these changes. You need not fear that because of meditation you are going to lose control and get swept away by a new way of life. As you gradually develop a quiet and clear awareness, your living habits will naturally come into harmony with your total environment, with your past involvements, present interests, and future concerns. There need be no sudden ending of relationships in order to prove your holiness. Such frantic changes only show your own lack of faith. When you are one in truth, in the flow, the changes in your life will come naturally." Ram Dass, https://www.ramdass.org/let-change/
“Freedom is possible. One in-breath alone is enough to set you free - from your regrets about the past, your worries about the future, and your projects in the present. In that state of freedom, you will make better decisions. Next time you have to make a decision, be sure to breathe in and out first.” Thich Nhat Hanh
Grief:
"Sometimes all this healing asks is that we become present. for ourselves. A meditation practitioner once came to one of our two month retreats at Spirit Rock after his four year 3 old son had died in a car accident. This man, the father, had been driving. Immediately following the accident, he had kept himself busy, seeking help and talking to shamans and lamas, and being consoled by friends and others. And yet, in some way, this was also a way to keep his grief at bay. Finally, when he knew he was ready, he came to a meditation retreat. Somehow he knew that it was time for him to experience his pain directly, to find the cure for the pain in the pain itself. He started with lots of prayers and mantras and visualizations. Finally, one morning he just sat still. Waves of grief and quilt and loss poured out. And his great and simple task was to bring a kind and healing attention to the grief and suffering that he carried and could no longer run from." Jack Kornfield, http://www.jackkornfield.com/the-temple-of-healing/
“To bow to the fact of our life's sorrows and betrayals is to accept them; and from this deep gesture we discover that all life is workable. As we learn to bow, we discover that the heart holds more freedom and compassion than we could imagine.” Jack Kornfield
"Over the years, in working with people who are grieving, I’ve encouraged them first of all to surrender to the experience of their pain. To counteract our natural tendency to turn away from pain, we open to it as fully as possible and allow our hearts to break. We must take enough time to remember our losses – be they friends or loved ones passed away, the death of long-held hopes or dreams, the loss of homes, careers, or countries, or health we may never get back again. Rather than close ourselves to grief, it helps to realize that we only grieve for what we love.In allowing ourselves to grieve, we learn that the process is not cut and dried. It’s more like a spiral that brings us to a place of release, abates for a time, then continues on a deeper level. Often, when grieving, we think that it’s over, only to find ourselves swept away by another wave of intense feeling. For this reason, it’s important to be patient with the process, and not be in a hurry to put our grief behind us." Ram Dass, Ram Dass, Love Serve Remember https://www.ramdass.org/learning-to-grieve/
From Brain Pickings, 7 wonderful children's books on grief and loss. I would love to have these in my library. Who can't relate to a beautifully told children's story about such a tough subject? http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/23/best-childrens-books-death-grief-mourning/
“The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.” How We Grieve: Meghan O’Rourke on the Messiness of Mourning and Learning to Live with Loss
Parenting:"You have to realize that your children are not containers you put things into. They are flowers that are emerging, and if you till the soil and keep it soft and fertilized, it’s amazing what comes up; because inherent in all of us is deep wisdom, which gets lost in the shuffle of socialization.So the question is, are you just an instrument of socialization as a parent, or are you somebody that respects the inner beauty of that person, that lets the child’s intuitive understanding of things lead, rather than leading out of ought or should or must or so on. A person learns a skill much faster when they want to learn a skill than when somebody else wants them to learn a skill. It’s pretty clear. So to that extent, you and your child are collaborative beings..." Ram Dass, Ram Dass, Love Serve Remember
Codependency:This can be such a tough issue. I am saving this one for the co-dependency files: http://tinybuddha.com/…/how-to-help-someone-who-wont-help-…/