room for all this

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. 
We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem,
 but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. 

They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again
 and fall apart again. It’s just like that. 

The healing comes from letting there be room for all this to happen;
 room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy. When we think 
something is going to bring us pleasure, we don’t know 
what’s really going to happen. When we think something is going
 to give us misery, we don’t know. 

Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all.
 We try to do what we think is going to help. But we don’t know. 
We never know if we’re going to fall flat or sit up tall.

 When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story.
 It may just be the beginning of a great adventure.

~ Pema Chodron

art by van gogh

open space

Only in an open, nonjudgmental space can we acknowledge what we are feeling.

Only in an open space where we're not all caught up

 in our own version of reality can we see

 and hear and feel who others really are, 

which allows us to be with them and 

communicate with them properly.

We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from 
communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts
 of who's right and who's wrong. We do that with the people 
who are closest to us, and we do it with political systems, 
with all kinds of things that we don't like about our associates
 or our society. 

.

Blaming is a way to protect our hearts, to try to protect what is soft 
and open and tender in ourselves.

Blame is away in which we solidify ourselves. 
Not only do we point the finger when something is "wrong,"
 but we also want to make it "right."

We start with ourselves. We make ourselves right or wrong, every day, 
every week, every month and year of our lives.  When we feel right,
 we feel good, especially if we have people agreeing with us
 about how right we are. Suppose someone disagrees, then what? 
 Do we find ourselves getting angry and aggressive?  We might see
 that this is what wars are make of. Whether we judge ourselves
 "right" or "wrong," the judgement gives us the satisfaction 
of "knowing." This way we avoid the awkward unsettled uncomfortableness
 of continuing to look more deeply at our words or behavior.

Until we can become comfortable hanging out with ourselves
 without leaping to judgement it will be very difficult to just be with another,
 to share and be truly compassionate. Learning to accept and live in a space
 of the awkwardness of not knowing, to replace self-judgement with gentleness
 is needed to move into the broken-open hearted  
compassion that truly reflects who we are.



~ Pema Chodron
from When Things Fall Apart

pain and pleasure

Human beings try to avoid pain by setting up permanent zones of pleasure. 

The mind is always seeking to create permanent territories of pleasure to avoid pain. 

But these zones, what we might call 'zones of safety' don't last. 

They always fall apart, and because they are fleeting, 

then we scramble to find another zone of pleasure to help us forget our pain. 

This going round and round is what we mean by samsara. 

Hell is just resistance to life. It's counter-intuitive, but if we stop, 

become curious about the pain, learn to befriend it 

and work with it, actually learn how to be genuine friends 

of ourselves, then the pleasures of life become authentic pleasures 

as opposed to numbing agents, anesthetizing us from our genuine experience.

~ Pema Chodron, 

Dharma talk, Karma Dzong, Boulder, Colorado, 1999

 art by Edvard Munch