Dedicating some time to meditation is a meaningful expression of caring for yourself that can help you move through the mire of feeling unworthy of recovery. As your mind grows quieter and more spacious, you can begin to see self-defeating thought patterns for what they are, and open up to other, more positive options.
Interpretation
Meditation is essential for self-care and overcoming feelings of unworthiness.
This quote emphasizes the value of meditation as a form of self-care that facilitates recovery from negative thought patterns. By practicing meditation, one can create a more tranquil mind, allowing for reflection on harmful beliefs and the opportunity to embrace healthier, more positive thoughts and choices.
In practice
In a wellness seminar, to encourage attendees to prioritize mental health.
It doesn't matter how long we may have been stuck in a sense of our limitations. If we go into a darkened room and turn on the light, it doesn't matter if the room has been dark for a day, a week, or ten thousand years - we turn on the light and it is illuminated. Once we control our capacity for love and happiness, the light has been turned on.
Patience doesn't mean making a pact with the devil of denial, ignoring our emotions and aspirations. It means being wholeheartedly engaged in the process that's unfolding, rather than ripping open a budding flower or demanding a caterpillar hurry up and get that chrysalis stage over with.
To be truly happy in this world is a revolutionary act...It is a radical change of view that liberates us so that we know who we are most deeply and can acknowledge our enormous ability to love.
The critical element in meditation practice is beginning again. Everyone loses focus at times, everyone loses interest at times, and everyone gets distracted over and over again. What is essential, and also incredibly transforming, is realizing that we have the ability to begin again, without blaming or judging ourselves, without thinking we have failed, without losing heart, we can, and need to, constantly be beginning again.
It's a rare and precious thing to be close to suffering because our society - in many ways - tells us that suffering is wrong. If it's our own suffering, we try to hide it or isolate ourselves. If others are suffering, we're taught to put them away somewhere so we don't have to see it.
Doing nothing means unplugging from the compulsion to always keep ourselves busy, the habit of shielding ourselves from certain feelings, the tension of trying to manipulate our experience before we even fully acknowledge what that experience is.
Of old the expert in battle would first make himself invincible and then wait for his enemy to expose his vulnerability.
As quickly as you can go 4-1, you can go 1-4. And the whole objective is not to get too high and not to get too low. It's one thing to tell somebody that and explain it, but it's another thing to really buy in, to have felt that and understand what it means to stay even-keel. That's what you have to be in this league.
When one side benefits more than the other, that's a win-lose situation. To the winner it might look like success for a while, but in the long run, it breeds resentment and distrust.
No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
Before we can be cured we must want to be cured. Those who really wish for help will get it; but for many modern people even the wish is difficult.
There is a world of difference between a person who has a big problem and a person who makes a problem big.
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