.:.
“I had taught endlessly about the same things: the great need for maitri (loving-kindness toward oneself), and developing from that the awakening of a fearlessly compassionate attitude toward our own pain and that of others.”
.:.
“The other underlying theme was dissolving the dualistic tension between us and them, this and that, good and bad, by inviting in what we usually avoid. My teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, described this as “leaning into the sharp points.”
.:.
“It made me laugh to see that, just as I had so often said, making friends with our own demons and their accompanying insecurity leads to a very simple, understated relaxation and joy.”
.:.
“If your life is chaotic and stressful, there’s plenty of advice here for you. If you’re in transition, suffering from loss, or just fundamentally restless, these teachings are tailor made. The main point is that we all need to be reminded and encouraged “to relax with whatever arises and bring whatever we encounter to the path.”
.:.
“Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.”
.:.
“During a long retreat, I had what seemed to me the earth-shaking revelation that we cannot be in the present and run our story lines at the same time! It sounds pretty obvious, I know, but when you discover something like this for yourself, it changes you.”
.:.
“Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear. When I was first married, my husband said I was one of the bravest people he knew. When I asked him why, he said because I was a complete coward but went ahead and did things anyhow.”
.:.
“Nothing is what we thought. I can say that with great confidence. Emptiness is not what we thought. Neither is mindfulness or fear. Compassion—not what we thought. Love. Buddha nature. Courage. These are code words for things we don’t know in our minds, but any of us could experience them. These are words that point to what life really is when we let things fall apart and let ourselves be nailed to the present moment.”
.:.
“When you have made good friends with yourself, your situation will be more friendly too.”
.:.
“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 off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit.”
.:.
“Every day we could think about the aggression in the world, in New York, Los Angeles, Halifax, Taiwan, Beirut, Kuwait, Somalia, Iraq, everywhere. All over the world, everybody always strikes out at the enemy, and the pain escalates forever. Every day we could reflect on this and ask ourselves, “Am I going to add to the aggression in the world?” Every day, at the moment when things get edgy, we can just ask ourselves, “Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to war?”
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“This Very Moment Is the Perfect Teacher”
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“Meditation is an invitation to notice when we reach our limit and to not get carried away by hope and fear.”
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“It doesn’t really matter what causes us to reach our limit. The point is that sooner or later it happens to all of us.”
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“The most important aspect of being on the spiritual path may be to just keep moving.”
.:.
“But egolessness? When we reach our limit, if we aspire to know that place fully—which is to say that we aspire to neither indulge nor repress—a hardness in us will dissolve. We will be softened by the sheer force of whatever energy arises—the energy of anger, the energy of disappointment, the energy of fear. When it’s not solidified in one direction or another, that very energy pierces us to the heart, and it opens us. This is the discovery of egolessness.”
.:.
“We don’t sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we’ll be more awake in our lives.”
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“Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.”
.:.
“After some time, Rinpoche added another refinement to the instruction. He began to ask us to label our thoughts “thinking.” We’d be sitting there with the out-breath, and before we knew what had happened, we were gone—planning, worrying, fantasizing—completely in another world, a world totally made of thoughts. At the point when we realized we’d gone off, we were instructed to say to ourselves “thinking” and, without making it a big deal, to simply return again to the out-breath.”
.:.
“So right from the beginning it’s helpful to always remind yourself that meditation is about opening and relaxing with whatever arises, without picking and choosing.”
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“This starts with realizing that whatever occurs is neither the beginning nor the end. It is just the same kind of normal human experience that’s been happening to everyday people from the beginning of time. Thoughts, emotions, moods, and memories come and they go, and basic nowness is always here.”
.:.
“The trick then is to practice gentleness and letting go. We can learn to meet whatever arises with curiosity and not make it such a big deal. Instead of struggling against the force of confusion, we could meet it and relax. When we do that, we gradually discover that clarity is always there.”
.:.
“Rikpa literally means “intelligence” or “brightness.” Behind all the planning and worrying, behind all the wishing and wanting, picking and choosing, the unfabricated, wisdom mind of rikpa is always here. Whenever we stop talking to ourselves, rikpa is continually here.”
.:.
Khandro Rinpoche
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“The way to dissolve our resistance to life is to meet it face to face.”
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“Cutting our expectations for a cure is a gift we can give ourselves.”
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“It’s a transformative experience to simply pause instead of immediately filling up the space.”
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“Mindfulness is the ground; refraining is the path.”
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“There’s something there in us that we don’t want to experience, and we never do experience, because we’re so quick to act.”
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“Well-being of speech is like a lute without strings. Even without strings, the musical instrument proclaims itself. This is an image of our speech being settled. It doesn’t mean that we’re controlling, uptight, trying hard not to say the wrong thing. It means that our speech is straightforward and disciplined.”
.:.
“Without giving up hope—that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be—we will never relax with where we are or who we are.”
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“Nontheism is realizing that it’s not just babysitters that come and go. The whole of life is like that. This is the truth, and the truth is inconvenient.”
.:.
“We can drop the fundamental hope that there is a better “me” who one day will emerge. We can’t just jump over ourselves as if we were not there. It’s better to take a straight look at all our hopes and fears. Then some kind of confidence in our basic sanity arises.
This is where renunciation enters the picture—renunciation of the hope that our experience could be different, renunciation of the hope that we could be better.”
.:.
“Giving up hope is encouragement to stick with yourself, to make friends with yourself, to not run away from yourself, to return to the bare bones, no matter what’s going on.”
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“The human race is so predictable. A tiny thought arises, then escalates, and before we know what hit us, we’re caught up in hope and fear.”
.:.
“Do we just feel pleasure or pain? Or is there a whole libretto that goes along with it?”
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“Before we know it, we’ve composed a novel on why someone is so wrong, or why we are so right, or why we must get such-and-such. When we begin to understand the whole process, it begins to lighten up considerably.”
.:.
“This letting things go is sometimes called nonattachment, but not with the cool, remote quality often associated with that word. This nonattachment has more kindness and more intimacy than that. It’s actually a desire to know, like the questions of a three-year-old. We want to know our pain so we can stop endlessly running. We want to know our pleasure so we can stop endlessly grasping. Then somehow our questions get bigger and our inquisitiveness more vast. We want to know about loss so we might understand other people when their lives are falling apart. We want to know about gain so we might understand other people when they are delighted or when they get arrogant and puffed up and carried away.”
.:.
“It’s also pretty obvious that people need help and that there’s no way to benefit anybody unless we start with ourselves.
Our motivation for practicing begins to change, and we desire to become tamed and reasonable for the sake of other people. We still want to see how the mind works and how we get seduced by samsara, but it’s not just for ourselves. It’s for our companions, our children, our bosses—it’s for the whole human dilemma.”
.:.
“When we feel lonely, when we feel hopeless, what we want to do is move to the right or the left.”
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“Complete discipline is another component of cool loneliness. Complete discipline means that at every opportunity, we’re willing to come back, just gently come back to the present moment. This is loneliness as complete discipline.”
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“Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are.”
.:.
“We always want to get rid of misery rather than see how it works together with joy.”
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“Egolessness has been compared to the rays of the sun. With no solid sun, the rays just radiate outward. In the same way, wakefulness naturally radiates out when we’re not so concerned with ourselves.”
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“But what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”
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“The essence of life is that it’s challenging.”
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“Death is wanting to hold on to what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together. So even though we say the yama mara is fear of death, it’s actually fear of life.”
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“Learning how to be kind to ourselves, learning how to respect ourselves, is important. The reason it’s important is that, fundamentally, when we look into our own hearts and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn’t just ourselves that we’re discovering.”
.:.
“That’s the beginning of growing up. As long as we don’t want to be honest and kind with ourselves, then we are always going to be infants. When we begin just to try to accept ourselves, the ancient burden of self-importance lightens up considerably. Finally there’s room for genuine inquisitiveness, and we find we have an appetite for what’s out there.”
.:.
“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. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better.”
.:.
“if what we’re feeling is rage, we usually assume that there are only two ways to relate to it. One is to blame others. Lay it all on somebody else; drive all blames into everyone else. The other alternative is to feel guilty about our rage and blame ourselves.”
.:.
“Bodhichitta is a Sanskrit word that means “noble or awakened heart.” It is said to be present in all beings. Just as butter is inherent in milk and oil is inherent in a sesame seed, this soft spot is inherent in you and me.”
.:.
“It wasn’t just her life, it was life itself.”
.:.
“Whether it’s in the small fears of a job interview or the unnameable terrors imposed by war, prejudice, and hatred; whether it’s in the loneliness of a widow or the horrors of children shamed or abused by a parent, in the tenderness of the pain itself, night travelers discover the light of bodhichitta.”
.:.
“Bodhichitta is available in moments of caring for things, when we clean our glasses or brush our hair. It’s available in moments of appreciation, when we notice the blue sky or pause and listen to the rain. It is available in moments of gratitude, when we recall a kindness or recognize another person’s courage. It is available in music and dance, in art, and in poetry. Whenever we let go of holding on to ourselves and look at the world around us, whenever we connect with sorrow, whenever we connect with joy, whenever we drop our resentment and complaint, in those moments bodhichitta is here.”
.:.
“The word paramita means “going to the other shore.”
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“What makes this discipline free from severity is prajna. It’s not the same as being told not to enjoy anything pleasurable or to control ourselves at any cost. Instead, this journey of discipline provides the encouragement that allows us to let go.”
.:.
“Sitting there, standing there, we can allow the space for the usual habitual thing not to happen. Our words and actions might be quite different because we allowed ourselves time to touch and taste and see the situation first.”
.:.
“Meditation is a totally nonviolent, nonaggressive occupation. Not filling the space, allowing for the possibility of connecting with unconditional openness—this provides the basis for real change.”
.:.
“we have a lot of opinions, and we tend to take them as truth. But actually they aren’t truth. They are just our opinions.”
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“Opinions are opinions, nothing more or less.”
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“The root cause of famine, starvation, and cruelty at the personal level is aggression. When we hold on to our opinions with aggression, no matter how valid our cause, we are simply adding more aggression to the planet, and violence and pain increase.”
.:.
“In the context of social action, we can see that what a government or corporation or individual is doing is clearly causing rivers to be polluted or people and animals to be harmed. We can take photographs of it; we can document it. We can see that suffering is real. That is because of our intelligence and because we don’t let ourselves be swept away by opinions of good and evil or hope and fear.”
.:.
“The truth, said an ancient Chinese master, is neither like this nor like that. It is like a dog yearning over a bowl of burning oil. He can’t leave it, because it is too desirable, and he can’t lick it, because it is too hot.”
.:.
“From their own experience they have passed along to us the encouragement not to jump over the big squeeze, but to look at it just as it is, not just out of the corner of an eye. They showed us how to experience it fully, not as good or bad, but simply as unconditioned and ordinary.”
.:.
“There are three traditional methods for relating directly with difficult circumstances as a path of awakening and joy. The first method we’ll call no more struggle; the second, using poison as medicine; and the third, seeing whatever arises as enlightened wisdom.”
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Machig Labdrön
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“Everything that occurs is not only usable and workable but is actually the path itself.”
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“Samaya is like a marriage with reality, a marriage with the phenomenal world.”
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“There is no other way to enter sacred world. We have to stop thinking that we can get away and settle down somewhere else. Instead, we could just relax—relax with exhaustion, indigestion, insomnia, irritation, delight, whatever.”
.:.
“Once when I was spending hours and hours doing a certain practice, I became so agitated that I could hardly sit still. Later, I told Rinpoche that I felt irritated at everything, even little specks of dust. He said that happened because the practice was demanding me to be sane and I wasn’t used to that yet.”
.:.
“The challenges are to give in, to surrender our way of doing things, and not to split when we feel threatened. Basically, the challenge is to be genuine—to feel our pounding heart or shaking knees or whatever it is, and stick with it. In a nutshell, very few of us ever allow ourselves to be in a situation that doesn’t have at least a teensy-weensy little exit, a place where we can get out if we have to.”
.:.
“Somehow, feeling that we are ready to have no exit just occurs by itself.”
.:.
“I know that not only is the dharma more revolutionary, but also that for many of us, the dharma itself supplies the tools and support we need to find our own beauty, our own insight, our own ability to work with neurosis and pain.”
.:.
“Stopping my actions was the first step and the hardest one.”
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“Usually we feel that there’s a large problem and we have to fix it. The instruction is to stop. Do something unfamiliar. Do anything besides rushing off in the same old direction, up to the same old tricks.”
.:.
“But I kept remembering the teachings that say that until we stop clinging to the concept of good and evil, the world will continue to manifest as friendly goddesses and harmful demons.”
.:.
“Some of us can accept others right where they are a lot more easily than we can accept ourselves. We feel that compassion is reserved for someone else, and it never occurs to us to feel it for ourselves.”
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“Gradually, without any agenda except to be honest and kind, we assume responsibility for being here in this unpredictable world, in this unique moment, in this precious human body.”
.:.
“There was such a huge longing to solve the problem, what Trungpa Rinpoche called “nostalgia for samsara.”
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“We are stuck in patterns of grasping and fixating which cause the same thoughts and reactions to occur again and again and again. In this way we project our world. When we see that, even if it’s only for one second every three weeks, then we’ll naturally discover the knack of reversing this process of making things solid, the knack of stopping the claustrophobic world as we know it, putting down our centuries of baggage, and stepping into new territory.
If you ask how in the world we can do this, the answer is simple. Make the dharma personal, explore it wholeheartedly, and relax.”
.:.
“This path has one very distinct characteristic: it is not prefabricated. It doesn’t already exist. The path that we’re talking about is the moment-by-moment evolution of our experience, the moment-by-moment evolution of the world of phenomena, the moment-by-moment evolution of our thoughts and our emotions.”
.:.
“We‘re always in some kind of mood. It might be sadness, it might be anger, it might be not much of anything, just a kind of blur. It might be humor or contentment. In any case, whatever it is, that’s the path.”
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“We can aspire to be kind right in the moment, to relax and open our heart and mind to what is in front of us right in the moment. Now is the time.”
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“Now is the only time. How we relate to it creates the future.”
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“What we do accumulates; the future is the result of what we do right now.”
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“We can make ourselves miserable, or we can make ourselves strong. The amount of effort is the same.”
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“Right now we are creating our state of mind for tomorrow, not to mention this afternoon, next week, next year, and all the years of our lives.”
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“What seems undesirable in our lives doesn’t have to trigger habitual reactions.”
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“We can let it show us where we’re at and let it remind us that the teachings encourage precision and gentleness, with loving-kindness toward every moment.”
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“whatever occurs can be regarded as the path and that all things, not just some things, are workable.”
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“This teaching is a fearless proclamation of what’s possible for ordinary people like you and me.”
.:.
Domingo, 26 septiembre 2021
