Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“When you can recognize the suffering in the other person and see how that suffering came about, compassion arises. You no longer have the desire to punish or blame the other person. You can listen deeply, and when you speak there is compassion and understanding in your speech. The person with whom vou're speaking will feel much more comfortable, because there is understanding and love in your voice.”

“Once you have some understanding and insight into your own suffering, you begin to be better at under standing and communicating with someone else. If you can't accept yourself—if you hate yourself and get angry with yourself—how can you love another person and communicate love to him or her?”

“We tend to think we already know and understand our loved ones very well, but that may not be so. If we haven't understood our own suffering and our own perceptions, how can we understand the suffering of another person?”

“We all should learn to embrace our own suffering, to listen to it deeply, and to have a deep look into its nature. In doing so, we allow the energy of love and compassion to be born. When the energy of compassion is born, right away we suffer less. When we suffer less, when we have compassion for ourselves, we can more easily understand the suffering of another person and of the world.”

“Any suffering that has not been released and reconciled will continue. Until it has been understood and transformed, we carry with us not just our own suffering but also that of our parents and our ancestors. Getting in touch with the suffering that has been passed down to us helps us understand our own suffering. Understanding suffering gives rise to compassion. Love is born, and right away we suffer less.”

“But there is a way of getting in touch with the suffering without being overwhelmed by it. We try to avoid suffering, but suffering is useful. We need suffering. Going back to listen and understand our suffering brings about the birth of compassion and love.”

“The marketplace provides us with everything imaginable to help us run away from ourselves. We consume all these products in order to ignore and cover up the suffering in us. Even if we're not hungry, we eat. When we watch television, even if the program isn't very good, we don't have the courage to turn it off because... we may have to go back to ourselves and get in touch with the suffering inside.”

“If we understand our own suffering, it will become much easier for us to understand the suffering of others and of the world. We may have the intention to do something or be someone that can help the world suffer less, but unless we can listen to and acknowledge our own suffering, we will not really be able to help.”

“We know that the suffering inside us contains the suffering of our fathers, our mothers, and our ancestors. Our ancestors may not have had a chance to get in touch with the practice of mindfulness, which could help them transform their suffering. That is why they have transmitted their unresolved suffering to us.”

“The quiet of non thinking and not talking gives us the space to truly listen to ourselves. We don't have to try to get away from our suffering. We don't have to cover up what is unpleasant in us. In fact, we try to be there for ourselves, to understand, so that we can transform.”

“I carry mindfulness with me, like a guardian angel on my shoulder. The angel is always with me when I practice. It helps me be unafraid of whatever suffering or pain arises. It's much more important to keep your mindfulness with you than to keep your mobile phone. You think that you're safe when carrying your phone. But the truth is that mindfulness will do much more than a phone to protect you...”

“The other thing that happens when we stop thinking and talking and we begin listening to ourselves is that we notice the suffering present in our lives. There may be tension and pain in our bodies. We may have old pains and fears or new pains and fears, which we have hidden under our talking and texting and thinking.”

“When you attend a meeting or an event, you turn off your telephone. Why? Because you want to communicate and absorb others' communication. It is the same when communicating with yourself. This kind of communication is not possible with the phone. We're used to thinking a lot and talking a lot. But to communicate with ourselves, we need to practice non thinking and not talking.”

“Breathing in and breathing out is a practice of freedom. When we focus our attention on our breath, we release everything else, including worries or fears about the future and regrets or sorrows about the past. Focusing on the breath, we notice what we're feeling in the present moment. We can do this throughout the day, enjoying the twenty-four hours that have been given us to breathe in and out.”

“When we begin to practice mindful awareness, we start the path home to ourselves. Home is the place where loneliness disappears. When we're home, we feel warm, comfortable, safe, fulfilled. We've gone away from our homes for a long time, and our homes have become neglected.”

“sometimes the best way to communicate is to write a letter or an e-mail. If you can write a letter that's full of understanding and compassion, then during the time of writing that letter you will nourish yourself Everything you write will be nourishing for the person you are writing to, and first of all for you. ... because what you're saying in the letter is full of compassion and understanding.”

“We think that with all our technological devices we can connect, but this is an illusion. In daily life we're dis-connected from ourselves. We walk, but we don't know that we're walking. We're here, but we don't know that we're here. We're alive, but we don't know that we're alive. Throughout the day, we lose ourselves.”

“Many of us spend a lot of time in meetings or e-mailing with others, and not a lot of time communicating with ourselves. The result is that we don't know what is going on within us. It may be a mess inside. How, then, can we communicate with another person?”

“We all hunger for love, but we don't know how to generate love in order to feed ourselves with it. When we're empty, we use technology to try to dissipate the feeling of loneliness, but it doesn't work.”

“Loneliness is the suffering of our time. Even if we're sur-rounded by others, we can feel very alone. We are lonely together. There's a vacuum inside us. It makes us feel uncomfortable, so we try to fill it up by connecting with other people. We believe that if we're able to connect, the feeling of loneliness will disappear.”

“Everytime we speak without mindful awareness, we are feeding our suffering.”

“We are always meeting ourselves in the places where we are stuck.”

“What allowed you to, as you say, "stitch yourself" together again? A synchronicity. Remember what Jung said about this? A synchronicity occurs when an outer event matches an inner reality. So, in my case, there was this moment back at my father's place a couple of weeks ago when the outer and inner merged in one magical instance and the union of the opposites happened in the outer world and the inner world.”

“Nothing inspires more reverence and awe in me than an old man who knows how to change his mind.”

“Because the one task that the young feminine must learn at adolescence is to begin to integrate that part of her represented by the masculine. And the masculine does not kiss. It lays down boundaries. It says, "do not cross this line."... You know, the reason there is a marriage at the end of these tales is that it represents the union of the feminine and the masculine elements. ”

“Marie-Louise von Franz was the master interpreter of these tales, I mean she was a genius—I love her work. She said that she didn't want her students to memorize her lectures, but just to sit with the fairy tales and work through them because interpretation was an art which depended on the individual. She then said that a class where these interpretations are taking place is almost a confession.”

“Nothing ever changes within unless you are willing to pay the price. Some people would rather die than pay the price that changing a conscious attitude demands of you. And so they calcify until rigor mortis sets in.”

“Perfectionism is the curse of the masculine. Discernment is its highest expression.”

“By honouring the feeling function, which is very much devalued. Marie-Louise von Franz complained that the opponents of atomic plants in her day were belittled for using only "feeling arguments and no sensible, reasonable arguments." The implication was that any feeding value informed by empathy was nonsense. How do we build a functioning world when that is the case?" ”

“Now, with respect to the feminine/masculine divide, one of the key steps in the process of becoming ourselves is the inner marriage of these two qualities." ”