Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha.
Managing life from our mental control towers, we have separated ourselves from our bodies and hearts.
Awakening self-compassion is often the greatest challenge people face on the spiritual path.
It is through realizing loving presence as our very essence, through being that presence, that we discover true freedom.
When we see the secret beauty of anyone, including ourselves, we see past our judgment and fear into the core of who we truly are – not an entrapped self but the radiance of goodness.
As long as we are alive, we feel fear. It is an intrinsic part of our makeup, as natural as a bitter cold winter day or the winds that rip branches off trees. If we resist it or push it aside, we miss a powerful opportunity for awakening.
Through the sacred art of pausing, we develop the capacity to stop hiding, to stop running away from our experience. We begin to trust in our natural intelligence, in our naturally wise heart, in our capacity to open to whatever arises.
What would it be like if I could accept life – accept this moment – exactly as it is?
Buddhist practices offer a way of saying, ‘Hey, come back over here, reconnect.’ The only way that you’ll actually wake up and have some freedom is if you have the capacity and courage to stay with the vulnerability and the discomfort.
But this revolutionary act of treating ourselves tenderly can begin to undo the aversive messages of a lifetime.
By running from what we fear, we feed the inner darkness.
We are waiting for the next moment to contain what this moment does not.
Meditation is evolution’s strategy to bring out our full potential.
The emotion of fear often works overtime. Even when there is no immediate threat, our body may remain tight and on guard, our mind narrowed to focus on what might go wrong. When this happens, fear is no longer functioning to secure our survival. We are caught in the trance of fear and our moment-to-moment experience becomes bound in reactivity. We spend our time and energy defending our life rather than living it fully.
The great gift of a spiritual path is coming to trust that you can find a way to true refuge. You realize that you can start right where you are, in the midst of your life, and find peace in any circumstance. Even at those moments when the ground shakes terribly beneath you – when there’s a loss that will alter your life forever – you can still trust that you will find your way home. This is possible because you’ve touched the timeless love and awareness that are intrinsic to who you are.
Staying occupied is a socially sanctioned way of remaining distant from our pain.
Spiritual awakening is the process of recognizing our essential goodness, our natural wisdom and compassion.
The poet Longfellow writes, “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
If our sense of who we are is defined by feelings of neediness and insecurity, we forget that we are also curious, humorous and caring. We forget about the breath that is nourishing us, the love that unites us, the enormous beauty and fragility that is our shared experience in being alive.
There is only one world, the world pressing against you at this minute. There is only one minute in which you are alive, this minute here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.