Some of us have a hard time believing that we are actually able to face our own pain. We have convinced ourselves that our pain is too deep, too frightening, something to avoid at all costs. Yet if we finally allow ourselves to feel the depth of that sadness and gently let it break our hearts, we may come to feel a great freedom, a genuine sense of release and peace, because we have finally stopped running away from ourselves and from the pain that lives within us.
Interpretation
Facing our pain is essential for healing and finding peace.
This quote emphasizes the importance of confronting our inner pain rather than avoiding it. By allowing ourselves to fully experience and process our sadness, we can ultimately find freedom and peace, suggesting that embracing vulnerability leads to personal growth and healing.
In practice
During a mental health awareness talk, this quote could be used to encourage people to face their emotional struggles.
The greatest barrier to own own healing is not the pain, sorrow or violence inflicted upon us as children. Our greatest hindrance is our ongoing capacity to judge, to criticize, and to bring tremendous harm to ourselves. If we can harden our heart against ourselves and meet our most tender feelings with anger and condemnation, we simultaneously armor our heart against the possibility of gentleness, love and healing.
Effortlessness is the ability to slow down and listen for the spaces between the joints... Deep within all things there is a natural rhythm, a music of opening and closing, expansion and contraction.
The heart of most spiritual practices is simply this: Remember who you are. Remember what you love. Remember what is sacred. Remember what is true. Remember that you will die and that this day is a gift. Remember how you wish to live.
Meditation helps me feel the shape, the texture of my inner life. Here, in the quiet, I can begin to taste what Buddhists would call my true nature, what Jews call the still, small voice, what Christians call the holy spirit.
If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbathβ our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbath for us.
Every single choice we make, no matter how small, is the ground where who we are meets what is in the world. And the fruits of that essential relationship- the intimate, fertile conversation between our own heart's wisdom and the way the world has emerged before us- becomes a lifelong practice of deep and sacred listening for the next right thing we are required to do. We make the only choice that feels authentic and honest, necessary and true in that moment.
We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers and sisters.
Lost rights are never regained by appeals to the conscience of the usurpers, but by relentless struggle....goa ts are used for sacrificial offerings and not lions.
It takes courage not only to make decisions, but to live with those decisions afterward
I'm not a victim - I never want to be perceived that way.
And when those bombs went off, there were runners who, after finishing a marathon, kept running for another two miles to the hospital to donate blood. So, here's what I know - these maniacs may have tried to make life bad for the people of Boston, but all they can ever do, is show just how good those people are.
When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree by the river of truth, and tell the whole world - No, you move.
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