On the inner level, the discipline is to return to gentleness, to honesty, to letting go. Discipline provides us with the support to slow down enough and to be present enough so that we can live our lives without making a mess. It provides the encouragement to step further into groundlessness. we are disciplining any form of potential escape from reality. Discipline allows us to be right here and connect with the richness of the moment.   ~Pema Chodron

fire. ash. heart.

inquiry for today~   fuel your insight through dedication to the simple light of heart fire…..a perfect time of year to honor and release the tightness that has gripped us for so long…..

the slow burning away

Every wisdom tradition offers an authentic path, a practice vehicle that can transform our ignorance and unbind us from our limitation in ego. There are many. They are beautiful- humanity’s greatest legacy.  Inquiry is a focused mind, committed to creating a meditative equipoise that can see. Insight is the realization seen and known. Surrender is a renunciation of previous attachment and identification, a release of ignorance. With commitment to seeing the truth of how things are, we follow a path of wise view, of penetrating understanding of the universal causal factors of the separate self-sense. The less we believe in the illusions created within the unconscious conditions of life-in-form- the conditions of dependent arising- the less our attention is trapped within the paradigm they create and within the assumptions and unease of the paradigm. Once we see through the illusion, we no longer assent to it. It’s like watching a great magician perform his piece de resistance. We wow, we marvel; we’re stunned with what we believe we see. When the secret is revealed, we can see the illusion as illusion- perhaps still enjoying it but no longer believing it or clinging to it. The distance between enjoying and clinging can be measured in light years. The truth of the path carries us out of the tight and binding grip of self, out of samsara, and directly to the recognition of grace as our own essential nature.    ~Kathleen Dowling Singh