Category: Teachings

What happens within seems to move outward and to also happen “out there,” with other people, with one’s surroundings. The more inner allowing occurs — feeling what’s there to be felt, letting the light of awareness freely penetrate the whole of the interior, without walling off, without recoiling or timidity or the attempt to change anything — the more readily the heart extends itself, without judgment or self-protection, toward others. (more…)

“It’s a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand.” There is surely something to what Madeleine L’Engle says, how when devastation comes along in a life (which it will, and probably more than once), it does have a way of separating the truly mattering things from over-emphasized trivia. A radical undermining makes vivid the things with enduring authenticity, not subject to whim, or even to a major tremor.

A conscious orientation to ongoing pain, whether physical or emotional, means the “ongoingness” of the condition doesn’t hold your attention. What’s attended is this moment, whatever the moment consists of — however bad it may feel, however likely the condition may appear (via the mind) to be unending or uncertain. (more…)

We live our lives in definition, in naming. Above all, in self-definition. All of life, it’s I am a this, I am a that. As if a label, a declaration, can account for it all, for all of whatever it is to be alive, to really live. (more…)

It’s a force of nature, the largeness of whatever it is that opens a person to possibility beyond how things have been so far. The expanding sense of self, the softening, the falling apart of the familiar. It’s so clear we’re not in charge of this process. (more…)