Human Incarnation

" Inevitably, maintaining our authenticity means constantly living within patterns and breaking patterns.  It is not about eliminating our humanness.  Not about eliminating our want to be loved, but curbing the stubborn ways we hurt and disrespect ourselves to get that love.   This involves recognizing the unhealthy patterns we fall into and correcting our course.   It is not helpful to label what doesn't work as bad and then strive to rid ourselves of our human flaws.   The aim is not to make ourselves pure and one-sided in our aliveness, but to inhabit all of who we are, living into the dilatations and constrictions of our strengths and weaknesses.  It is about learning how to live through being human, until the rhythm of being human can be celebrated as the magically imperfect vessel of Spirit that it is."  Mark Nepo

Patterns

"We need to examine the nature of patterns and how healthy ones (meaningful practices) can calcify into unhealthy ones (habitual routines).   We need to consider the art of softening habitual routines back into meaningful practices.  We need to discern when the rigid ones just need to be broken so our hearts can once again breathe."

Patterns

"We are all constantly in a process of creating, sustaining or destroying the patterns that carry our life.  Often we suffer terribly because we resist these elemental needs.   Given our stubbornness and willfulness, we often find ourselves sorely stalled in the face of change."  Mark Nepo

Authenticity and Listening

"If I don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god
home, we may miss our star."

William Stafford

Family

"Sometimes when i think of my parents, who have hurt me, I am lulled by a wintering sky to feel for them, to try on their view, but in my empathy an old pattern kicks in and I start to lose the truth of my hurt, as if there is only room for one set of feelings -theirs.

The struggle is a common one.  So often we feel for others and lose ourselves, or cut others off to preserve ourselves.  Like a radio that can only tune to one station at a time, it seems like only one side of things can be received, though all sides are broadcast.

But compassion is a deeper thing that waits beyond the tension of choosing sides.  Compassion, in practice, does not require us to give up the truth of what we feel or the truth of our reality.  Nor does it allow us to minimize the humanity of those who hurt us.  Rather, we are asked to know ourselves enough that we can stay open to the truth of others, even when their truth or their inablility to live up to their truth has hurt us.

This does not remove the emotional facts of our lives, nor does it ask us to remain in a hurtful situation.  Rather compassion asks that we open like mountains to the sky, like mountains that can withstand every kind of weather."  Mark Nepo