Our commitment to being with ourselves more intimately and consistently brings us up close and much more personal with all of the stuff we were hoping to get rid of. Sometimes this happens during our actual meditation practice, but often it happens after, when we return to our life, work, kids, bills, and relationships.
By contrast to the inherent peace and spaciousness that we’ve remembered through our practice, our anger, impatience, fear, and doubt come as a less-than-welcome shock when they return.
But the very human fact is that they do return. Unfortunately, these pesky, contracted human emotions are part of the package.
We don’t get rid of anything.
But wait, it’s not all bad news. In owning that stuff—stopping the pretense that we don’t actually have any of it, projecting it onto others, blaming situations, or thinking ourselves bad and terrible people for feeling it—we start to get curious. We give ourselves a break. Until we find the eyes to see more clearly, we practice forgiveness, gentleness, and compassion for our own shortcomings. We stay on our own team. But most of all, what we learn to do is choose. And that is how we become that peaceful, calm, and happy person we always wanted to be. One choice at a time.
Not by reading about it, or wishing for it, or pretending to be. But by staying alert and very, very curious to what trips us up. Taking each new opportunity as a chance to lighten up.
Through every trigger, every unique scenario, disbelieving the lot as we go.
We find a willingness to inquire like water on a fire, our humour and tenderness a salve to any burns we might acquire along the way.

~Lucy Roberts

wild. mind. holding. on.

inquiry for today~ don’t worry so much about doing it all right today…what’s it like to notice something other than judging mind?

what ya doing, just sittin’ there

What is your life about anyway?

Nothing but a struggle to be someone.

Nothing but a running

from your own silence.

~Rumi