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Confess your hidden faults. Approach what you find repulsive. Help those you think you cannot help. Anything you are attached to, let it go. Go to places that scare you.
All too frequently we relate like timid birds who don’t dare to leave the nest. Here we sit in a nest that’s getting pretty smelly and that hasn’t served its function for a very long time. No one is arriving to feed us. No one is protecting us and keeping us warm. And yet we keep hoping mother bird will arrive.
“Do I prefer to grow up and relate to life directly, or do I choose to live and die in fear?”
A human being is a part of the whole called by us “the universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Although we have the potential to experience the freedom of a butterfly, we mysteriously prefer the small and fearful cocoon of ego.
we can misuse any substance or activity to run away from insecurity.
No matter how we get trapped, our usual reaction is not to become curious about what’s happening. We do not naturally investigate the strategies of ego. Most of us just blindly reach for something familiar that we associate with relief and then wonder why we stay dissatisfied.
there are three principal characteristics of human existence: impermanence, egolessness, and suffering or dissatisfaction.
I feel gratitude that someone saw the truth and pointed out that we don’t suffer this kind of pain because of our personal inability to get things right.
life isn’t always going to go our way.
And we don’t like that.
“We are always in transition.”
Then he said, “If you can just relax with that, you’ll have no problem.”
we begin to understand that we’re not the only one who can’t keep it all together. We no longer believe that there are people who have managed to avoid uncertainty.
Self-importance hurts us, limiting us to the narrow world of our likes and dislikes.
train in staying open and curious—to train in dissolving our assumptions and beliefs—is the best use of our human lives.
Because we mistakenly take what is always changing to be permanent, we suffer.
meditation is not just about feeling good. To think that this is why we meditate is to set ourselves up for failure. We’ll assume we are doing it wrong almost every time we sit down:
meditate every day,
It becomes increasingly clear that we won’t be free of self-destructive patterns unless we develop a compassionate understanding of what they are.
For a moment you can bring your awareness directly back to being right here. You are sitting.
All of us derive security and comfort from the imaginary world of memories and fantasies and plans.
So whenever we wander off, we gently encourage ourselves to “stay” and settle down. Are we experiencing restlessness? Stay! Discursive mind? Stay! Are fear and loathing out of control? Stay! Aching knees and throbbing back? Stay! What’s for lunch? Stay! What am I doing here? Stay! I can’t stand this another minute! Stay! That is how to cultivate steadfastness.
Emotion can’t proliferate without our internal conversations.
When we struggle against our energy we reject the source of wisdom. Anger without the fixation is none other than clear-seeing wisdom.
Pride without fixation is experienced as equanimity. The energy of passion when it’s free of grasping is wisdom that sees all the angles.
We learn to abide with the experience of our emotional distress.
The slogan “Train in the three difficulties” gives us instruction on how to practice, how to interrupt our habitual reactions. The three difficulties are (1) acknowledging our neurosis as neurosis, (2) doing something different, and (3) aspiring to continue practicing this way.
We do anything that doesn’t reinforce our crippling habits.
practice means not continuing to strengthen the habitual patterns that keep us trapped,
Never underestimate the power of compassionately recognizing what’s going on.
Do we understand where the desire to lash out at another is coming from?
Do we aspire not to keep going down that same old self-destructive road?
Do we realize that the suffering we feel is share...
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In practicing the four limitless qualities, we aren’t trying to convince ourselves of anything, nor are we trying to hide our true feelings. We are expressing our willingness to open our hearts and move closer to our fears. Aspiration practice helps us to do this in increasingly difficult relationships.
We say, “May I (or a loved one) enjoy happiness and the root of happiness,” or we put that in our own words. Perhaps we say, “May we learn to be truly loving people.” Or “May we have enough to eat and a place to sleep where we will be safe and comfortable.”
“May I be free of suffering and the root of suffering.”
“May I be safe and free from accidents. May I be free of anger, . . . fear, and worries. May I not fall into a state of indifference or be caught in the extremes of craving and aversion. May I not be the victim of self-deception.”
the best way to serve ourselves is to love and care for others.
