This is an excerpt from "Happiness is an inside job: practicing for a joyful life" by Sylvia Boorstein. It speaks to me because it is about how your mind can take a painful situation and make it worse by spinning stories and creating confusion. It talks about how we can all help ourselves deal with the many challenges we face in our life by slowing down and honoring our experience fully. The book as a whole is a great resource and this excerpt is one of several good ones:
"Still, I consider my meditation practice a success because of one crucial and definite change in me in the thirty years since I began. I now trust that even when what is happening to me is difficult and my response to it is painful, I will not suffer if I can keep my mind clear enough to keep my heart engaged. I know that my suffering begins whenever my mind, for whatever reason - the enormity or the suddenness of the challenge, its own exhausted state - becomes confused. In its confusion, it seems to forget everything it ever knew, It tells itself stories, alternatively angry ("This isn't fair!") or pitiful (Poor me!") or frightening ("I can't stand it if things aren't different!"). No inner voice of wisdom ("This is what is happening, it's part of the whole spectrum of painful things that happen to human beings, and you can manage") can make itself heard to soothe the distress. I continue to suffer, stumbling around in stories of discontent, until I catch myself, and stop, and allow myself to know, and deeply feel, that I am frightened or confused or disappointed or angry or tired or ashamed or sad- that "I'm in pain!" Then my own good heart, out of compassion, takes care of me. It all happens when I am able to say to myself (I honestly do use these very words), "Sweetheart, you are in pain. Relax. Take a breath. Let's pay attention to what is happening. Then we'll figure out what to do." "
submitted by samk
4 comments:
Thank you for sharing this beautiful wisdom. Somehow, it seems meant just for me.. and how very needed it has been!
I wanted to share a quote that says something very similar:
"It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment.
What creates despair is the imagination, which insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand." by Andre Dubus
I think that being in the moment, and releasing and allowing energy to pass through you, is modeled in nature and takes a lifetime (or more!) for us humans to master. Sometimes allowing pain, also allows gifts of patience, humility, and opens us to be cared for - by others and ourselves. We can also consider what power we give the experience, and sometimes calling it something else - or not labeling it at all - changes the experience in surprising ways.
I agree that the need to predict what the future will hold is draining and fruitless since we really can't know this. It does seem like a poor use of the imagination, meaning I don't think we are often imagining the best future but only the worst. Clearly anything that we can do to be in the moment is better than this "bad imagination" mindset.
The quote from Andre Dubus illuminates this wisdom perfectly. My mind races around playing old 'tapes',predicting all manner of calamity. This creates exhaustion,confusion,terror. Any inner wisdom is drowned out.
As future trials unfold, may I (we) use my(our)imaginations to uplift. May we call ourselves sweetheart.
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