A softer way to say it

[sabrinamari]

Wakefulness is found in pleasure and pain

In practicing meditation, we’re not trying to live up to some kind of ideal – quite the opposite. We’re just being with our experience, whatever it is. If our experience is that sometimes we have some kind of perspective and sometimes we have none, then that’s our experience. If sometimes we can approach what scares us, and sometimes we absolutely can’t, then that’s our experience. “This very moment is the perfect teacher, and it’s always with us,” is really a most profound instruction. Just seeing what’s going on – that’s the teaching right there. We can be with what’s happening and not dissociate. Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary every-day lives. 

Pema Chodron

Comments

[arielmn.livejournal.com]

I did some of this last night. I was tired and hungry and suddenly went from low key to very angry. I pulled all that in 'sat' with it and sifted through what triggered what emotions in me.

No breakthroughs on 'how I will never do that again', but an understanding of the feelings tht got me there

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

That 's a WONDERFUL outcome! It's a real accomplishment to be able to stop the knee-jerk downward spiral and look exactly at what's happening. I'm impressed.

I still struggle with this often.

[maewyn]

Are you on Twitter? If so, you might like to follow bunnybuddhism. The most recent tweet is relevant, I think (and I certainly found it a good thing to carry with me): "A bunny can't grow if he is always trying to avoid suffering."

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

I love this, woman.

It's especially fitting that "bunny" is one of my nicknames.

And I'm growing, that's fo' sure.

[maewyn]

Yay! I thought you would get a kick out of it. :D