Facing Suffering

" Facing, feeling, and accepting our own suffering keeps us from reenacting it on others."  Mark Nepo

Jihad

"The original meaning of the Muslim word "jihad" is to face one's own demons.  This is the holy war.  Without the ability to face our own demons, we often seek revenge rather than feel what is ours to feel.  For vengeance is a powerful distraction from accepting the legitimate suffering that arises from the wheel of life; an acceptance that can make kindred spirits us all, if we let it."  Mark Nepo

Suffering

"What is the key to untie the knot of your mind's suffering?  Act great.  My dear, always act great."  Hafiz

Suffering

"Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering."
~Don Miguel Ruiz

Listening

"When you sit down to listen, you say, 'I listen like this with one purpose: to allow him or her to speak out and to suffer less." -Thich Nhat Hanh

Loving What Is

"Life is simple. Everything happens for you, not to you. Everything happens at exactly the right moment, neither too soon nor too late. You don't have to like it... it's just easier if you do."
— Byron Katie

Sorrow

"When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight." -Kahlil Gibran

Pain vs. Suffering

"There will always be pain in life.   This is something we learn in life as we progress spiritually.  We also learn that if we resist pain, if we fear it, then we create additional pain, called suffering.  Our resistance to pain stands between us and full-emodied living; it keeps us at war with our problems and from making peace with life's dual nature."   Hazrat Inayat Khan

Your Pain

"Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.  Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that it's heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.  And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not be less wondrous than your joy; And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.  And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief."  Kahlil Gibran

It Doesn't Interest Me

"It doesn't interest me if there is one God
Or many gods.
I want to know if you beling - or feel abandoned;
If you know dispair
Or can see it in others.
I want to know
If you are prepared to live in the world
With it's harsh need to change you,
If you can look back with firm eyes
Saying "this is where I stand."
I want to know if you know how to melt
Into that fierce heart of living.
Falling toward the center of your longing.
I want to know if you are willing
To live day by day
With the consequences of love
And the bitter unwanted passion
Of your sure defeat.
If you have been told
In that fierce embrace
Even the God's
Speak of God."

David Whyte

Peace and Unity

"Once we enter the unitive state, our passport is good in both worlds."  Eknath Easwaran

Understanding

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life. –J. Krishnamurti

Oneness

"What we reach for may be different, but what makes us reach is the same."  Mark Nepo

Oneness

"If we're not planting seeds that are going to reveal that oneness to us, we're simply perpetuating our own pain, because all of our suffering comes from being lost in separateness." --Krishna Das

Suffering and Pain

"Pain is a given.  Suffering comes from our resistance to pain."  Stephen Levine

MIndfulness

"The answer to anger or other negative states is not to suppress or deny them, but to embrace them with mindfulness like a mother with a baby."  Thich Nhat Hanh

Humanity and Growth

“Our humanity is not an attribute that we have received once and forever with our conception. It is a potentiality that we have to discover within us and progressively develop or destroy through our confrontation with the different experiences of suffering that will meet us through our life."
—Xavier Le Pichon

Illusion

"A wise man, recognizing that the world is but an illusion, does not act as if it is real, so he escapes the suffering." ~The Buddha

Women's Friendships

"How might your life have been different, if as a young woman, there had been a place for you, a place where you could go to be with women? A place where you could be received as you strove to order your moments and your days.

A place where you could learn a quiet centeredness...to help ground yourself in daily patterns that would nurture you through their gentle rhythms...and after the fires were lighted and the drumming and the silence, you heard for the very first time...each woman slowly speaking into the stillness, sharing her feelings of how she saw her life and what she wished to say of it...weaving the threads of her life into a fabric to be given and named.

And as the shadows of the day lengthened into dusk and you leaned your head against your mother's shoulder, you pondered in your heart a different sense of a woman's life.

If someone had been able to see that you were taking the first tiny baby steps toward feeling your own feelings, of knowing that you saw life differently than those around you. If you had been helped to experience your own uniqueness, to feel the excitement of sensing, for the very first time, your own awareness of life. What if someone had helped you to own all of this...to own your own life.

And the women helped you to go inside yourself and consider all the experiences of your life and to reflect on them...if the women had helped you draw your thoughts and feelings together and to weigh them...so that you could come to a clearer knowing of what your life was about. And if the women had listened as you told them of your whole life and the meaning that it held for you.

And at the end of that process...the oldest women in the lodge had come and sat in a circle and you saw that they had left an empty place....a place for you. And you softly and timidly made your way to the empty space and quietly claimed your wisdom. The wisdom of your soul.........How might your life have been different?"

Pain

"Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;

And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.

And you would watch with serenity through the winters your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility:

For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,
and the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears."