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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Shannon Lee
Read between
July 23 - August 13, 2022
In the Western world, we tend to consider yin and yang as opposites: hot and cold, young and old, tall and short. But in the Eastern world, yin yang (notice I removed the and separating the two) are considered complements of one another, not opposites. In fact, they work together to represent the whole of experience. If you think about it, hot and cold are merely the extreme ends of the whole experience of temperature. Without hot, there is not cold, and vice versa. And further, without both, there is not the moderate pleasantness of warmth or coolness.
My father believed that this act—of leaving behind the burdens of one’s preconceived opinions and conclusions—had in itself a liberating power. In fact, if this step is the only one you actively work on for a while, you will expand your life considerably.
Instead of weighing everything as good or bad, right or wrong, as it is happening, become a fully sensing organism so that you may see and encounter the experience with your whole being. If you focus too much on the mind and its preconceived ideas and assessments, you are holding part of yourself separate from the totality of the experience. But if you can pause and allow yourself to sense everything, perhaps you will experience something new or a richer version of something you already know.
I picture my mind like a sacred bowl filled with all my thoughts and feelings of the day, and as I say or think the words “Empty your mind; be formless, shapeless, like water,” I picture all those thoughts emptying out and washing down through my body like a gentle waterfall. I let the worries, the to-do lists, and the stress just filter down through my being and drain into the earth. Then I sit quietly as the bowl of my mind refills with clean, clear, still water or white light or whatever feels good. You can also view your empty bowl as an invitation for it to fill with whatever you need to
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Most important, this position of experimentation makes everything a little less heavy and a little more fun. The new framework of curiosity and possibility can take the stress or fear out of the feeling that your decisions are monumentally fixed and finite. Set life up like an experiment, investigate and be open to the findings, and the heaviness of living may ease just a bit.
The idea of the opponent here is more along the lines of sparring partners—the people with whom we connect and who can ultimately challenge us, in beautiful and difficult ways, to be better versions of ourselves.