I listened to to Tara Brach's Radical Acceptance while on lunchtime walks in the oncoming spring. Here are passages that seemed to add to her 40 Day Meditation plan the I recently completed.
Avoidance of painful emotion and truth. It had been better to run rather than get burned by the truth [of patient's real relationship with her mother]. Better to run than feel as though she were bad and unloved. But now, with hope stripped away, Laura was returning to the feelings she had spent a lifetime hiding from. Until we stop our mental business, stop our endless activities, we have no way of knowing about our actual experience. We typically know only how to avoid it. But stopping can be terrifying.
Our "shadow" is rooted in shame, bound by our sense of being basically defective. Whenever we reject a part of ourselves, we are confirming our fundamental unworthiness. Underneath "I shouldn't get so angry," lies "There's something wrong with me if I do."
Pausing. We should pause often -- before we get out of the car, at specific times at work. There are natural periods of wholeness and ease.... it is this that sustains us.
Saying Yes. We bring alive this spirit of radical acceptance when, instead of resisting emotional pain, we are able to say yes to our experience. "So walk with your heaviness, saying yes. Yes to sadness , yes to whispered longing, yes to the fear."
Grasping and Avoidance of Sensation. The mind instantly and unconsciously assesses whatever we experience as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. When pleasant sensations arise, our reflex is to grasp and hold on to them. We often do this with planning and with the emotional energies of excitement or yearning. When we experience unpleasant sensations, we contract, trying to avoid them. Again the process is the same, we worry and strategize, we feel fear and irritation. Neutral is our signal to disengage and turn our attention elsewhere, which usually means an experience is that more intense or stimulating . All our reactions to people, to situations, to thoughts in our minds, are actually reactions to kinds of sensations that are arising in our body.... when we react with impatience to someone else's ineptness, we are reacting to our own unpleasant sensations. (longing and fantasy when we are attracted...). Our entire swirl of reactive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors behaviors springs from ground of reacting to sensations.
Stop resisting our body's reactions. Awaken from trance. Each moment we wakefully "let be" we are home.
Loving Kindness affects the world. One moment of unconditional love can bring into question a lifetime of feeling invalidated. Love seeks happiness of others. It causes others to open in love.
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