We cannot simply forgive and forget, nor should we.
When we respond to our pain and suffering with love, understanding, and acceptance – for ourselves, as well as others – over time, we can let go of our anger, even when we’ve been hurt to the core. But that doesn’t mean we ever forget.
Cultivating loving kindness for ourselves is the foundation of real love for our friends and family, for new people we encounter in our daily lives, for all beings and for life itself.
The difference between a life laced through with frustration and one sustained by happiness depends on whether it is motivated by self-hatred or by real love for oneself.
Forgiveness can be bittersweet. It contains the sweetness of the release of a story that has caused us pain, but also the poignant reminder that even our dearest relationships change over the course of a lifetime.
Effort is the unconstrained willingness to persevere through difficulty. It is not a harsh, straining, desperate effort but, rather, an ardent and wholehearted remembrance of our capacity for freedom. Right Effort is willingness to open where we have been closed, to come close to what we have avoided, to be patient with ourselves, and to let go of our preconceptions.
I’ve been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened,” Mark Twain once said.
The overarching practice of letting go is also one of gaining resilience and insight.
The starting place for radical re-imagining of love is mindfulness.
Everything is impermanent: happiness, sorrow, a great meal, a powerful empire, what we’re feeling, the people around us, ourselves.
The man felt that she had not been a very good mother and was not a good person. At one point, Nisargadatta advised him to love his mother. The man replied, “She wouldn’t let me.” Nisargadatta responded, “She couldn’t stop you.” No external condition can prevent love; no one and no thing can stop it. The awakening of love is not bound up in things being a certain way. Metta, like the true nature of the mind, is not dependent; it is not conditioned.
The Dalai Lama has said: “My religion is kindness.” If we all adopted such a stance and embodied it in thought and action, inner and outer peace would be immediate, for in reality they are never not present, only obscured, waiting to be discovered. This is the work and the power of lovingkindness, the embrace that allows no separation between self, others, and events – the affirmation and honoring of a core goodness in others and in oneself.
Desire- grasping, clinging, greed, attachment – is a state of mind that defines what we think we need in order to be happy. We project all of our hopes and dreams of fulfillment onto some object of our attention. This may be a certain activity or outcome, a particular thing or person. Deluded by our temporary enchantment, we view the world with tunnel vision. That object, and that alone, will make us happy.
The fulfillment we have in owning, in desiring, is temporary and illusory, because there is nothing at all we can have that we will not lose eventually. And so there is always fear.
Having’ something makes us think we can control it.
The Buddha actually described at some length what he meant by being a good friend in the world. He talked about a good friend as someone who is constant in our times of happiness and also in our times of adversity or unhappiness. A friend will not forsake us when we are in trouble nor rejoice in our misfortune. The Buddha described a true friend as being a helper, someone who will protect us when we are unable to take care of ourselves, who will be a refuge to us when we are afraid.
There is no reason for a feeling of separation from anything or anyone, because we have been it all and done it all. How then can we feel self-righteous or removed from anyone or any action? Ther is no spot on this earth where we have not laughed, cried, been born and died. So in some sense, every single place we go is home. Everyone we meet we know. Everything that is done we are capable of.
Letting go – abandoning, relinquishing – is actually the same mind state as generosity. So the practice of giving deeply influences the feeling tone of our meditation practice, and vice versa.
Generosity has such power because it is characterized by the inner quality of letting go or relinquishing.
If we define ourselves by each of the ever-changing feelings that cascade through us, how will we ever feel at home in our own bodies and minds?