Somehow, in feeling our own pain and sorrow, our own ocean of tears, we come to know that ours is a shared pain and that the mystery and beauty and pain of life cannot be separated. This universal pain, too, is part of our connection with one another, and in the face of it we cannot withhold our love any longer.

We can learn to forgive others, ourselves, and life for its physical pain. We can learn to open our heart to all of it, to the pain, to the pleasures we have feared. In this, we discover a remarkable truth: Much of spiritual life is self-acceptance, maybe all of it. Indeed, in accepting the songs of our life, we can begin to create for ourselves a much deeper and greater identity in which our heart holds all within a space of boundless compassion.   ~Jack Kornfield

how will you suffer less and still dive in deeply?

inquiry for today~   buffered by great storms and winds and tides….this is how we can see our day to day experiences drifting by…..what will captivate you today to see and respond in less limiting ways?

acts of seeing

Authentic spiritual development cannot begin until we deeply comprehend that we do not really know how to see ourselves. Development can only begin from where we are, and if we believe that we are more knowledgeable than we actually are or that we know ourselves more deeply than we do, the initial lessons of the path will be to reveal to us how little we actually know. We prefer fiction to truth, and many of us lose the opportunity to know who we truly are. But just as the person we fear we are is a lie, the person we think we are is also a lie. We are neither. We are something different, and greater, than either of these. What that is can only be discovered in an authentic way through a long, dedicated process of soul-searching. When we finally admit that there are things about ourselves we cannot see, there arises a possibility to begin to take responsibility for our lives and, in so doing, to open ourselves to more understanding, more heartbreak, more challenge, more expansion, and a greater ability to serve humanity in progressively deeper ways.    ~Mariana Caplan