Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Understanding suffering

I had the wonderful opportunity today to attend a seminar by meditation teacher and psychotherapist Shelly Young. Here's something she said that we would all do well to remember:
"It doesn't matter what arises; it's how you relate to it."
Of course, at that point she was talking about what arises in one's meditation. But we could also say that it doesn't matter what happens in life; what matters is how we relate to what happens. And that is very good news. Because we cannot always choose what happens but we can indeed always choose how we relate to what happens. All it takes is training and practice. And that's what mindfulness meditation is all about.

1 comment:

  1. THE WILLINGNESS OF SEEDS


    I drove a spine of road through wheat fields home.
    An old love going dumb, I looked for words
    In fields that lay on either hand: it's hard, I thought,
    To let a language go that holds a world in place.
    It was the pain of loss that made me stop
    Beside the road and watch a storm ease
    Brooding from the south, the fields open to the rain.
    Miles away, the rain fell whispering to the ground
    While love lay speechless in this hull of flesh.
    I considered language and the message of that far
    And whispered rain, the distance I had traveled
    To be stopped by pain between old language and a
    Vision which made that language obsolete: so much,
    I decided, depends on rain and the willingness of seeds.

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