AOM Meditations: 022119

Boxer of Quirinal

Greek Hellenistic bronze sculpture (100-50 BC)

Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome

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"A few years ago, I sat on my son's bedroom floor folding some baby clothes that he'd outgrown.  I could feel the sadness and regret creeping in, but I wanted so badly to feel OK about the passage of time.  I quickened my pace to push the pain away.  I wanted the moment to be over.  Suddenly, though, I looked up and notices a very blue sky staring down through the window.  Just feel it, I said to myself, as I slowed down, trying to focus on the task in front of me. I held a shirt close to my face and inhaled as deeply as I could.  My heart seemed to crack and fill up at the same time as feelings of hope and loss collided right there in a pile of little boy's old clothes.  When I finally got up to leave the room, I wasn't sad anymore.  Instead, I thought about the miraculous growth of a child, whose shirt size is less about loss and more about the gift of life itself.

I don't know if you can live inside each and every moment.  But when you can, try to stop, look, and listen long enough to be right where you are, not in your past, not in your future.  Just right in the middle of a split second in time."

~Leslie Levine

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"The natural warmth that emerges when we experience pain includes all the heart qualities: love, compassion, gratitude, tenderness in any form. It also includes loneliness, sorrow, and the shakiness of fear. Before these vulnerable feelings harden, before the storylines kick in, these generally unwanted feelings are pregnant with kindness, with openness and caring. These feelings that we’ve become so accomplished at avoiding can soften us, can transform us. The openheartedness of natural warmth is sometimes pleasant, sometimes unpleasant—as “I want, I like,” and as the opposite. The practice is to train in not automatically fleeing from uncomfortable tenderness when it arises. With time we can embrace it just as we would the comfortable tenderness of loving-kindness and genuine appreciation."

~Pema Chödrön

(link)

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“The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.” 

~Pema Chödrön

(When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times)