Opening up to the Bigger Picture

     Being nonjudgmental is a key attitude in mindfulness, psychotherapy, actually all healthy relationships. To be nonjudgmental is to be open-minded, to intentionally cultivate a "beginner's mind" attitude even towards people, experiences & things we may strongly dislike. A basic component of being nonjudgmental is empathy.
     Carl Rogers, one of the founders of the humanistic (client-centered) approach to psychology, said this about empathy:
     "I believe [empathy] to be a process, rather than a state….
     1. It means entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it.
     2. It involves being sensitive, moment to moment, to the changing felt meanings which flow in this other person, to the fear or rage or tenderness or confusion or whatever they are experiencing.
     3. It means temporarily living in their life, moving about in it delicately without making judgments, sensing meanings of which they are scarcely aware, but not trying to uncover feelings of which they are totally unaware, since this would be too threatening.
     4. It includes communicating your sensings of their world as you look with fresh and unfrightened eyes at elements of which the individual is fearful. It means frequently checking with them as to the accuracy of your sensings, and being guided by the responses you receive.
     5. You are a confident companion to the person in his or her inner world. By pointing to the possible meaning in the flow of their experiencing you [can] help the person... to experience the meanings more fully…”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMi7uY83z-U&feature=emb_logo

      Many of us are extremely judgmental, in fact triggered, shut down & run from the words: 'God,' 'Buddha,' 'religious,' 'spiritual.' While this may have been entirely justified in our past, we now find ourselves defensively walled off from ultimate reality & depth of meaning - "the greater than my self", as well as clueless about getting there.
      So we suffer in isolation all the while sensing our need to connect with something greater. Until we heal this disconnect, ALL our relationships, even with our self, feel insubstantial, vague, undependable - we feel alone, lost, adrift, chronically dissatisfied, unable to get there from here.
     A few 'slender threads' to help extricate ourselves from this paradoxical, painfully frozen state:

     "... the meaning of life (is) that which supersedes one’s egocentric view of life - to find something that’s greater than I am; something that I can work for, outside my own egocentric structure. And I must safeguard my egocentric structure, in order to have a platform for that too. That’s the either and or that’s so difficult for the modern person.”
      Robert A. Johnson. “The Golden World. The Search for Meaning, Fulfillment, and Divine Beauty.” Sounds True, Audiobook, 2018.

     “By religious attitude I am not referring to following a path toward redemption or salvation or even necessarily to being a member of a religious institution. A religious attitude relates to the cultivation of an openness to wonder, awe, fear, and reverence with respect to the ‘other,’ those numinous forces that exist outside our conscious control. These powers have been called at various times fate, destiny, the hand of God, or (to use Robert Johnson’s term) slender threads.

     Over the years I discovered that virtually everyone that comes to analysis is in some way facing a religious crisis, a term I prefer to neurosis, and every analysis is in some way a religious dilemma.
     This is the essence of what I learned from Dr. Jung: listen to your interior intelligence, take it seriously, stay true to it, and – most important – approach it with a religious attitude. His psychological term for this is individuation – discovering the uniqueness of yourself, finding out what you are not and finding out what you are. Individuation relates to wholeness, but it is not some indiscriminate wholeness but rather your particular relationship to everything else. You get to the whole only by working with the particularity of your life, not by trying to evade or rise above the specificity of your life. This is the blending of heaven and earth. This is a truly religious life."
       Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations.” HarperCollins, 1998. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

     "Learning how to be kind to ourselves, learning how to respect ourselves, is important. The reason it’s important is that, fundamentally, when we look into our own hearts and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn’t just ourselves that we’re discovering. We’re discovering the universe. When we discover the Buddha that we are, we discover that everything and everyone is Buddha. We discover that everything is awake and everyone is awake. Everything is equally precious and whole and good. When we regard thoughts and emotions with humor and openness, that’s how we perceive the universe. We’re not just talking about our individual liberation, but how to help the community we live in, how to help our families, our country, and the whole continent, not to mention the world and the galaxy and as far as we want to go.” Pema Chödrön

 

          "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
          Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
          It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us."           Marianne Williamson 

 

     In a remote Indian village home, Robert Johnson was asked:
     “‘We know our Indian scriptures and the sayings of our wise men. Please tell us some wisdom from your wise men.’
     This put me on the spot, and I searched my mind for something appropriate to say. Finally I remembered something from Meister Eckhart. ‘Well, one of our wise men says that the eye by which we see God is the same eye by which God sees us.’ …
     After several minutes, … ‘I don’t understand, what does this mean?’
     ‘Well, it means that God needs us as much as we need God.’
     The man fell over backward with a clump on the dirt floor. I couldn’t see (in the darkness) if he was laughing or if he was insulted and angry. When he sufficiently recovered and sat back up, he said, ‘Robert, we have never had such a thought as this.’ ”
       Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations.” HarperCollins, 1998.

          “We have calcium in our bones,
          iron in our veins,
          carbon in our souls,
          and nitrogen in our brains.
          93 percent stardust,
          with souls made of flames,
          we are all just stars
          that have people names.”                 Nikita Gill

          "To be truly happy in this world
          is a revolutionary act
          because true happiness depends upon a revolution in ourselves.
          It is a radical change of view that liberates us
          so that we know who we are most deeply
          and can acknowledge our enormous ability to love."       Sharon Salzberg

          “We are
          the scientists,
          trying to
          make sense of
          the stars
          inside us.”                Christopher Poindexter

Sculpture by Paige Bradley

 

Heart of Knowing

     We're all too familiar with getting headaches, illnesses & countless other problems from 'overthinking'. As a species, we've pushed rationality well past reasonable limits - to hyper-rationality! BALANCE is desperately needed. We must re-acquaint ourselves with & make regular use of ALL our ways of perceiving & knowing.
     Wolff's book below is imho a wonderful nudge towards not just sanity, but a much fuller life:

     “Suddenly, a new thought burst in on me: maybe I could sense water. In my mind I made a sort of list: seeing water, hearing water, smelling water. I might smell water, or even hear it if it was dripping on a leaf perhaps. I looked around.
     ‘Do not talk,’ Ahmeed said – I knew he meant ‘Do not think.’ ‘Water inside heart,’ he said next, with a gesture of his hand on his heart. I knew he meant I should sense inside – not with my mind, but from the inside.
     It is sad to have to use so many words to say something so simple.
     As soon as I stopped thinking, planning, deciding, analyzing – using my mind, in short – I felt as if I was pushed in a certain direction. I walked a few steps and immediately saw a big leaf with perhaps a half a cup of water in it.
     I must have stood there for a full minute, in awe. Not in awe of anything in particular, simply in awe.
     When I leaned over to drink from the leaf, I saw water with feathery ripples, I was a few mosquito larvae wriggling on the surface, I saw the veins of the leaf through the water, some bubbles, a piece of dirt. Reaching out, I put a finger in the water, then saw that one of the wriggling mosquito larvae had been trapped in a tiny bubble on my finger. How beautiful, how perfect. I did not put the finger with the water droplet in my mouth, but looked back at the leaf.
     My perception opened further. I no longer saw water – what I felt with my whole being was a leaf-with-water-in-it, attached to a plant that grew in soil surrounded by uncounted other plants, all part of the same blanket of living things covering the soil, which was also part of a larger living skin around the earth. And nothing was separate; all was one, the same thing: water-leaf-plant-trees-soil-animals-earth-air-sunlight and little wisps of wind. The all-ness was everywhere, and I was part of it.
     I cannot explain what went on inside me, but I knew that I had learned something unbelievably wonderful. I felt more alive than I had ever felt before.
    All of me was filled with being.
    What this other sense is, I do not know. For me it is very real. I think of it as a sense of knowing. It probably is a quality we all have to a greater or lesser degree. For me it works when I can get out of my mind, when I can experience without having to understand, or name, or position, or judge, or categorize.
     It is a quality that has to be used or it fades away; just as one has to exercise muscles, so too knowing must be exercised.
     I am saying this after the fact, trying to describe something that does not fit into our Western concepts, and therefore there are no words. At the time I did not think anything. I was learning how to put my mind aside and use some other sense to know.
     Standing over a leaf with a little water in it, somewhere in the jungles of Malaysia, I did not think in words. I did not think. I bathed in that overwhelming sense of oneness. I felt as if a light was lit deep inside me. I knew I was radiating something – love, perhaps – for this incredible world, this rich, varied, and totally interconnected world of creations that, at the same time, gave love to me. And with the love, I also felt a very deep sense of belonging.”
      Robert Wolff. “Original Wisdom. Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing.” Inner Traditions, 2001. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

     “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly;
      what is essential is invisible to the eye.”                         Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “The Little Prince”

 

      "The emergence and blossoming of understanding, love and intelligence has nothing to do with any tradition, no matter how ancient or impressive - it has nothing to do with time. It happens completely on its own when a human being questions, wonders, listens and looks without getting stuck in fear, pleasure and pain. When self concern is quiet, in abeyance, heaven and earth are open. The mystery, the essence of life is not separate from the silent openness of simple listening." Toni Packer

 

Natural Evolution of Understanding

     “Children come into the world with that sense of celebration and delight in the awesomeness of life. Then we eat of that wonderful, terrible fruit depicted in the story of the Garden of Eden, and our lives become divided. In childhood we have innocent wholeness, which then is transformed into informed separateness. If one is lucky, a second transformation occurs later in life, a transformation into informed wholeness. A proverb puts it this way: in life our task is to go from unconscious perfection to conscious imperfection and then to conscious perfection.
     As we grow up, most of us retain an intuition that heavenly wholeness exists somewhere, however harsh our lives may be. The boundary between the two worlds seems to be particularly thin during adolescence, a condition that does not occur again until we reach the age of forty-five or fifty. Then there is a chance to experience the Golden World again. Unfortunately, adults often dismiss such experiences as ‘only a dream’ or ‘childish talk.’ We tell our children to grow up and face the realities of life. As a result, many people give up on even finding wholeness.”
     Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations.” HarperCollins, 1998.

    Adults too often become & remain stuck in anger, resentment & cynicism towards people, religions, even life in general. Past traumas cause us to build defensive walls around our mind/emotions/body. All of us, to varying degrees, have been traumatized by those claiming to represent various religions. This hardens/toughens us, but then we're less than fully alive and can't explain why our life no longer shines. This is unnecessary, needless, optional, 'discretionary' suffering that we can heal. BUT to do so, alone or with guidance, we must go through our heavy defenses, to re-discover & re-unite with our own spacious depth. We CAN soften & gradually unlock OUR OWN chains. HOWEVER, aversion & intolerance towards: self-reflection, meditation, religion, spirituality, love, intimacy, etc can keep us deadlocked for life.
    Below, Rick Archer's (RA) excellent interview with Christian mystic, Cynthia Bourgeault PhD (CB):

     RA “You mentioned that you were kind of turned off from Christianity originally because it seemed so rigid, doctrinaire, stifling, and so on. I would say that this has been the problem with every religion, that there’s an inner core to every religion that its founder was likely living as a daily reality, and that over time, that core, that deeper dimension is lost, and so the religion becomes like a dead body without the spirit that animates a live body. So there’s nothing necessarily wrong with the outer forms of religion, but without their foundation and inner experience, they become calcified and problematic in so many ways.”
     CB “Exactly. And I think that Thomas Keating very, very correctly intuited that meditation or contemplation was the sap, was the flowing fluid that would restore the body of Christianity out of its calcification and back to life. And I think he’s a hundred percent correct in that. And that the practice just opens up capacities to comprehend the Gospel - which is a non-dual teaching - in a non-dual way. And without it, you don’t have a prayer. So his sense that somehow we had made this so high and so mighty that nobody was doing it was just absolutely locking Christianity at its lowest level of expression. And every religious tradition will have a lowest level of expression. It’s always going to happen. But when you have only your lowest level of expression, you don’t have a living religion any more.
     RA “When people get onto a spiritual practice, and really begin to make some progress, they begin to realize not only the truth of their own religion if they have one, it begins to make sense to them for the first time, but they begin to look at other religions and say, ‘Oh yeah, they were saying the same thing, just stated in a slightly different way, in a different culture and so on.”
     CB “Exactly, exactly. And until that happens, I think you really have to break through to the place where you see that every religious path, all the great sacred traditions are absolutely precious and necessary and irreplaceable like colors in the rainbow. If you lost one of them, the ability to understand what’s in the invisible light spectrum of God would be diminished.
     And I’ve also found for a lot of people, that they will leave Christianity (for example, just because it’s still for many of us our religion of upbringing), they’ll leave with a lot of wounds, go to another path, embrace it, and become very, very adept at that path. But you find that until they can come back and heal the wounds that they’ve had in their religion of origin, it’s going to limit their progress on the path they’ve chosen. They always hit a stuck place that’s not going to be resolved within that path. It’s going to be resolved by going back to where the issue was in their Christianity, working through that so they’re genuinely forgiving of the hurt that happened. And then they’re liberated. Then they can be a Buddhist, or a Sufi again, but the rigidity always enters at the same level.”
     Cynthia Bourgeault - Oct 23, 2017 Batgap interview: https://batgap.com/cynthia-bourgeault/

     Below, the same topic from a slightly different perspective, using different terminology:

     “Over the years I discovered that virtually everyone that comes to (Jungian) analysis is in some way facing a religious crisis, a term I prefer to neurosis, and every analysis is in some way a religious dilemma.
     This is the essence of what I learned from Dr. Jung: listen to your interior intelligence, take it seriously, stay true to it, and – most important – approach it with a religious attitude. His psychological term for this is individuation – discovering the uniqueness of yourself, finding out what you are not and finding out what you are. Individuation relates to wholeness, but it is not some indiscriminate wholeness but rather your particular relationship to everything else. You get to the whole only by working with the particularity of your life, not by trying to evade or rise above the specificity of your life. This is the blending of heaven and earth. This is a truly religious life.
     Of course, Jung didn’t invent this; it is as old as humankind. … but Jung presented it in a very practical way and in a language for modern times. After I learned from Dr. Jung the process of approaching daily life with a truly religious attitude, then I could begin to see how the great symbol systems of the world’s religions were saying similar things. I had grown up with Christian symbols and rituals all my life, but they had become empty; it is ironic that work with my dreams (and, later, living among Hindus in India) would teach me what those symbols and rituals were really about. Only when I could understand, for example, that the virgin birth was about a birth of new consciousness in me did that story begin to have profound meaning for me.
     Dr. Jung linked religious experience to the numinosum, a word for dynamic effects not caused by an act of human will, and he distinguished between religion and creed. A creed is a codified and dogmatized form of an original religious experience of the numinosum. Dr. Jung believed that all of the prophets for all the world’s religions experienced the numinosum, what I call the Golden World, and over time creeds were developed to help channel the energy and to explain such experiences to the uninitiated. Replacing the immediate experience of the Golden World with an institutionalized set of symbols and rituals has a valuable purpose in defending people against religious experience that might be overwhelming. Direct experiences of the Golden World are glorious but also painful and dangerous, and some people shouldn’t try to contain these energies on their own. The church, synagogue, temple, or mosque mediates between the numinosum and the everyday; it is a good place to reconcile the Golden World and the earthly world.
     Dr. Jung always tried to return patients to the religious systems in which they had experience, if that was possible. … I wasn’t pushing any form of religion, but I was very sensitive to the importance of the religious function in each person.”

     Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations.” HarperCollins, 1998.

    Life's too short to remain stuck. With courage and guidance, we can regain our zest for life - at any age!

Three Main Stages of Life

     “Children come into the world with that sense of celebration and delight in the awesomeness of life. Then we eat of that wonderful, terrible fruit depicted in the story of the Garden of Eden, and our lives become divided. In childhood we have innocent wholeness, which then is transformed into informed separateness. If one is lucky, a second transformation occurs later in life, a transformation into informed wholeness. A proverb puts it this way: in life our task is to go from unconscious perfection to conscious imperfection and then to conscious perfection.
      As we grow up, most of us retain an intuition that heavenly wholeness exists somewhere, however harsh our lives may be. The boundary between the two worlds seems to be particularly thin during adolescence, a condition that does not occur again until we reach the age of forty-five or fifty. Then there is a chance to experience the Golden World again. Unfortunately, adults often dismiss such experiences as ‘only a dream’ or ‘childish talk.’ We tell our children to grow up and face the realities of life. As a result, many people give up on ever finding wholeness.
     For me, the essence of life comes from these experiences of the Golden World. Such encounters with the divine have been called visionary, mystical, manifestations of cosmic consciousness, or, in secular language, peak experiences. Such experiences were the goal of life in the Middle Ages, when they were referred to as the Unitive Vision.
     I am fascinated by the word ecstatic, which in its original sense means to stand outside oneself. We work so hard to make a personal self, an ‘I’ or ego, with clarity and continuity. This is extremely valuable, but one pays a price for this ‘I’ – we become small, personal, and limited; we are a highly circumscribed entity in our ‘I-ness.’
     The ecstatic experience involves escaping from the ‘I-ness.’ This requires that we break the boundaries of our separateness to experience a greater realm, a realm that taxes our fines poets and artists to convey. It is the most valuable experience any person can have. The beauty of the Golden World is that one sees a vastness, something so much greater than oneself that one is left speechless with awe, admiration, delight, and rapture.
     After childhood, in our twenties and thirties, we are called upon to fulfill the cultural tasks of the society in which we live. In India this is called the householder stage, the time for building careers, raising families, paying bills, meeting all of our social obligations. But at midlife many people hunger again for some glimpse of the Golden World. By the time most of us become adults, we have lost all contact with this world. I only have to look carefully to see the spiritual hunger in the eyes of most Westerners. Rarely do you see radiance in the faces of middle-aged people. And so instead of reconnecting to the ecstatic realm as adults, we see the infamous midlife crisis in which one tries to fill the emptiness with all the extravagant things we have around us. This is the tragedy of many modern lives.
     Most of our neuroses come from hunger for the divine, a hunger that too often we try to fill in the wrong way. We drink alcohol, take drugs, or see momentary highs through accumulation of material possessions. All the manipulations of the outer world carry with them an unconscious hope of redeeming our lonely, isolated existence.
     The experience of paradise in the wholeness of youth is our birthright. It is a gift. However, seeing the Golden World again as an adult has to be earned. It requires inner work, a commitment not just to material success but to bringing some sense of meaning and purpose to one’s life. There is a paradox involved here. The Golden World cannot be acquired like a possession, and enlightenment cannot be turned into a project. We do not select an ecstatic experience; rather, it is delivered upon us as a state of grace. However, we can do the necessary inner work so that we are open to and prepared for such experiences when they arrive.”

      Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations.” HarperCollins, 1998. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Highest Service

      "Reminding others of the enormity of their own Great Nature is the highest service one can offer another." a Zen Master in Kyoto 

     “Hold attention as a resonant field, pay attention to the patterns. The price of admission is your narrative self, which is grounded in time.” Cynthia Bourgeault

     “To go beyond the ordinary mind is to go deeper than thought. In Buddhism ignorance is often defined as the belief that you are the conditioned mind.
     We have a mind, just as we have a body, but each is a manifestation of consciousness. What moves thoughts through the mind is precisely what moves the clouds across the sky. All are a part of the same continuum of creation unfolding. Mind and body float on the surface of the enormity of Being.
     To go beyond the mind is to ever so irrationally and ever so reasonably go beyond our conditioning to the place, the logos, where unconditional love arises spontaneously.  
     You have to be more than rational to accept and dwell in the mystery. You have to love the truth in all its wild and subtle and indescribable forms.
     We need to listen with the heart as we turn gently toward the mystery."
       Stephen Levine. “Turning Toward the Mystery. A Seeker’s Journey.” HarperSanFrancisco, 2002. 

Clearly Seeing & Smiling at It All

     Many feel uncomfortable unless busily distracted, "so I don't have to think about things." If the discussion, music or movie is judged at all serious, many will label it "depressing" and anxiously steer towards whatever is "light & cheerful" - "Oh, I never watch the news - it's too depressing!" This is understandable if you deal with trauma all day and need a break, but for many, deeply meaningful, significant matters are always taboo.
     It's impossible to continue burying one's head in the sand when things get seriously difficult. And things do get seriously difficult more often than we like. We're now going through a long period of difficulty. Let's face it wisely!

Pandemic March 23, 2020

What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.
And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.
Promise this world your love–
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.
Lynn Ungar

     "A good friend of mine said, 'You are married to sorrow.' And I looked at him and said, 'I am not married to sorrow. I just choose not to look away.'
     And I think there is deep beauty in not averting our gaze.
     No matter how hard it is, no matter how heartbreaking it can be. It is about presence. It is about bearing witness.
     I used to think bearing witness was a passive act. I don't believe that anymore. I think that when we are present, when we bear witness, when we do not divert our gaze, something is revealed—the very marrow of life. We change. A transformation occurs. Our consciousness shifts." 
                                                                                                                         Terry Tempest Williams

        Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist spent 20 years researching & documenting the neurological & cultural necessity for a healthy balance between the two hemispheres. Every day on the news we see people proudly trampling on socially & environmentally responsible values. Such folks (& their loyal followers) obviously perceive the world very differently than those with a healthy, functioning right hemisphere.
     “The right hemisphere is more realistic about how it stands in relation to the world at large, less grandiose, more self-aware, than the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere is ever optimistic, but unrealistic about its short-comings. …
     Although relatively speaking the right hemisphere takes a more pessimistic view of the self, it is also more realistic about it. … The evidence is that this is not because insight makes you depressed, but because being depressed gives you insight. …
     If there is a tendency for the right hemisphere to be more sorrowful and prone to depression, this can, in my view, be seen as related not only to being more in touch with what’s going on, but more in touch with, and concerned for, others. ‘No man is an island’: it is the right hemisphere of the human brain that ensures that we feel part of the main. The more we are aware of and empathically connected to whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, the more we are likely to suffer. Sadness and empathy are highly correlated: this can be seen in studies of children and adolescents. There is also a direct correlation between sadness and empathy, on the one hand, and feelings of guilt, shame and responsibility, on the other. Psychopaths, who have no sense of guilt, shame or responsibility, have deficits in the right frontal lobe ...” 
       Iain McGilchrist. “The Master and his Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.” Yale University Press, 2019.

     Through meditation we learn that true deep happiness is independent of conditions, and has qualities of peace, stillness, silence, equanimity and a sense of oneness or "interbeing." True deep happiness is much more subtle than popular ideas & wishes for happiness: http://www.johnlovas.com/2020/03/appreciating-subtle.html

"The world is not a problem to be solved;
it is a living being to which we belong.
It is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing.
And the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature,
which is also our own sacred nature." Thich Nhat Hanh

“Suffering is not enough.
Life is both dreadful and wonderful.
To practice meditation is to be in touch with both aspects. Smiling (tenderly to our selves as we behold whatever is arising in this moment of mindful self-reflection) means that we are ourselves, that we have sovereignty over ourselves, that we are not drowned in forgetfulness.
How can I smile when I am filled with so much sorrow?
It is natural --- you need to smile to your sorrow because you are more than your sorrow.”
                                                                                                                                   Thich Nhat Hanh

Parenting & the Matrix

     “We are all born into a matrix of greed, hatred, and delusion. To what degree we train ourselves to become free from the power of this matrix is a matter of self-correction.” Mu Soeng 
       Mu Soeng, Gloria Taraniya Ambrosia, Andrew Olendzki. “Older and Wiser. Classical Buddhist Teachings on Aging, Sickness and Death.” Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, 2017.
 
     To remain entranced, asleep within this matrix, is to choose to suffer needlessly. We can all awaken from greed, hatred, & delusion and thereby experience peace & joy "that surpasses all understanding." 

     Shefali Tsabary PhD is a psychologist specializing in healthy parenting. She's well worth a listen: "The Path To Awakening Yourself" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P9SauG4f70

Bridge Over Troubled Waters

     “To undergo shipwreck is to be threatened in a total and primary way. … what has dependably served as shelter and protection and held and carried one where one wanted to go comes apart. What once promised trustworthiness vanishes.” Sharon Danloz Parks

     The rapidly worsening climate crisis, endless senseless wars & resultant perpetual refugee crises, the Covid 19 pandemic & resultant sharp economic downturn, all in the hands of an unprecedented number of sociopathic world leaders, all add up to chaos. No wonder some of us feel "shipwrecked."

     Some words of encouragement:

Blessing for Courage
by John O’Donohue

When the light around lessens
And your thoughts darken until
Your body feels fear turn
Cold as a stone inside,
When you find yourself bereft
Of any belief in yourself
And all you unknowingly
Leaned on has fallen,
When one voice commands
Your whole heart,
And it is raven dark,
Steady yourself and see
That it is your own thinking
That darkens your world.
Search and you will find
A diamond-thought of light,
Know that you are not alone,
And that this darkness has purpose;
Gradually it will school your eyes,
To find the one gift your life requires
Hidden within this night-corner.
Invoke the learning
Of every suffering
You have suffered.
Close your eyes.
Gather all the kindling
About your heart
To create one spark
That is all you need
To nourish the flame
That will cleanse the dark
Of its weight of festered fear.
A new confidence will come alive
To urge you towards higher ground
Where your imagination
will learn to engage difficulty
As its most rewarding threshold!

     More on "Shipwrecks": https://healthyhealers.blogspot.com/search?q=shipwreck

Photo by P. Michael Lovas