Currently I’m reading the book True Refuge, Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart by Tara Brach, PhD. Since I am bereft of anything to say this week, I am going to offer a couple paragraphs from the book, which I found meaningful, below the fold.
Good evening and welcome to Monday Group Meditation. We will be sitting from 7:30 to 11:00 PM Eastern Time. It is not necessary to sit for the entire extended time, which is set up to make it convenient for people in four North American Time Zones; sit for as long as you like and when it is most convenient for you. Monday Group Meditation is open to everyone, believers and non-believers, who are interested in gathering in silence. If you are new to meditation and would like to try it for yourself, Mindful Nature gave a good description of one way to meditate in an earlier diary, copied and pasted below:
"It is a matter of focusing attention mostly. In many traditions, the idea is to sit and focus on the rising and falling of the breath. Not controlling it, but sitting in a relaxed fashion and merely observing experiences of breathing, sounds, etc. Be aware of your thoughts, but don't engage in them. When your mind wanders (it will, often), then return to focus on breath and repeat."
Sangha Co-hosts for meditation are:
7:30 - 10:00 Ooooh and davehouck
9:30 - 11:00 thanatokephaloides
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Our deficits are shaped and sustained by innumerable forces. Many of us are born with genetic tendencies toward anxiety, aggression, or depression; we are brought up in cultures that are plagued by addiction and violence, by deception and greed. Our environment is full of pollutants that affect our nervous system in innumerable and unknowable ways. Our families of origin are often beset by financial difficulties, by conflict and misunderstanding, by trauma carried through past generations. And crucially, how we treat ourselves and others is molded by how our own caretakers attended to us. Some interplay of these forces generate…painful emotions and compulsive behaviors.
If we become mindful of how our experience arises from a complex array of causes, we are at the threshold of an important insight: The compelling emotions that shape our self-sense are actually impersonal. Just as recurring blizzards or droughts don’t target a particular farm, our inner emotional weather is not owned by or controlled by this particular body and mind. Rather, it arises from causes beyond our individual existence.~Tara Brach, Ph.D.
It is a vivid description of the depth and breadth of the origination of our conditioning--our suffering. Perhaps it is even our first hint of how our conditioning arises. That impatience, that anger that surfaces again and again, that compulsive pattern that we consistently beat ourselves up over, all of that is really not our fault. We can stop blaming ourselves for all those strong emotions and compulsions. Our body/minds do not own them, they are impersonal and "arise from causes beyond our individual existence." Knowing that has the potential to give us just enough space to begin to feel some warmth and generosity towards ourselves.
When we see how we have been figuratively battered by our conditioning, which we now know is impersonal, we begin to understand how others are battered by their conditioning also. This opens the door to a whole new level of compassion, where we extend tenderness not just for ourselves, but for others and their imperfections as well.
Our conditioning is truly not our fault. Just knowing that we aren't "doing it to ourselves" can give us the room to stop blaming ourselves for our experience, and instead open us to feeling tenderness, care and concern for ourselves. With that in mind, in closing, I offer this iteration of the Metta Prayer for everyone who passes this way:
May you be happy, healthy and whole.
May you have love, warmth and affection.
May you be protected from harm, and free from fear.
May you be alive, engaged and joyful.
May you enjoy inner peace and ease.
May that peace expand into the world and throughout the entire universe.