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11/25/2018 0 Comments

Resilience

I've come to the conclusion recently that the number 1 thing I want my kids to come away from their childhood with is resilience. It is becoming more and more apparent to me as time goes on just how important this trait is in living a purposeful life.

The truth is, life can be hard. More to the point, every life has periods of hardships. This is illustrated in the Buddhist story of Kisa Gautami. (The following is from www.buddhanet.net.)

Kisa Gautami was a young woman from a wealthy family who was happily married to an important merchant. When her only son was one-year-old, he fell ill and died suddenly. Kisa Gautami was struck with grief, she could not bare the death of her only child. Weeping and groaning, she took her dead baby in her arms and went from house to house begging all the people in the town for news of a way to bring her son back to life.

Of course, nobody could help her but Kisa Gautami would not give up. Finally she came across a Buddhist who advised her to go and see the Buddha himself.

When she carried the dead child to the Buddha and told Him her sad story, He listened with patience and compassion, and then said to her, "Kisa Gautami, there is only one way to solve your problem. Go and find me four or five mustard seeds from any family in which there has never been a death."

Kisa Gautami was filled with hope, and set off straight away to find such a household. But very soon she discovered that every family she visited had experienced the death of one person or another. At last, she understood what the Buddha had wanted her to find out for herself — that suffering is a part of life, and death comes to us all. Once Kisa Guatami accepted the fact that death is inevitable, she could stop her grieving. She took the child's body away and later returned to the Buddha to become one of His followers.

We are all given challenges and difficult times in our lives which need to be overcome. The example with the Buddha above focuses on the challenge of grief, but we also experience challenges with our health, work, families, social groups, school, etc. But the stories that matter - the really good, inspiring stories - don't start and end with the challenge, with the suffering. The real stories aren't about how we are compelled to act, encounter an obstacle, and throw up our hands in defeat. They aren't about how we came up against a problem and walked away. They also aren't about how we tried to do something important and it was really easy and accomplished in short order. The real stories are about how we had an obstacle that felt like it was going to bring us down, and we found it within ourselves to push through it. Real inspiration comes from feeling hopeless and summoning the strength we didn't know we had to keep going. Think of any Hollywood movie. There is something which needs to be overcome, and almost always it is the perseverance and resilience of the character which allows the movie to arc. Without that challenge, there is no story.

I have a friend who is a marathon runner. I was always in awe of her marathon times. I have never been compelled to run a marathon, but her times were well below my half marathon times doubled, meaning I knew she was way faster than me. She had two babies in the last few years, and when she ran her first marathon post-children she had a very difficult time with it, finishing almost an hour and a half over her personal record. But in her most recent marathon, she brought her time down by 50 minutes from her previous time. I love her story so much for many reasons. A marathon is a long race. She had a full 26.2 miles to quit when she was having such a hard time in that first post-babies race. Running is every bit as mental as it is physical, and to keep pushing on when you know you're having a disappointing race is a huge accomplishment. THAT is a finish to celebrate - the fact that you kept putting one foot in front of the other and crossed that finish line. For hours she must have known she was off her time, and she persevered. She also didn't give up on marathons (here is the resilience!). That disappointing race was followed by another race, in which she made a huge improvement. Without that really difficult previous race, where would that renewed sense of accomplishment come from as she betters her time by FIFTY minutes? How can we truly appreciate the good times if we don't have any backdrop of bad times?

Being resilient isn't just to keep moving - it requires an adjustment within us. Sometimes we need to learn from a mistake, and then move forward. Sometimes we need to train harder, and then move forward. Sometimes we need to reevaluate and retool a plan, and then move forward. Sometimes we need to change our perspective, and then move forward.

So remember when you are in the midst of a low point: that's not the story. The real story is how you find your strength to persevere.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

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11/12/2018 0 Comments

Forgiveness

Meditation can be an act of cleansing and healing. Like the myriad of benefits gained from practicing meditation, you don't necessarily have to meditate with the intention of healing to experience it. I'm not talking about dramatic, suddenly-I-can-walk-again healing, but emotional and spiritual healing on a deep level. This is something that comes with time and dedication, and it is one of the reasons it's so helpful to meditate regularly (daily or twice daily). Lifting into the superconscious state is a natural path to healing.

There are, of course, things we can do outside of meditation, in our conscious state, that can also help us purify ourselves and facilitate that healing. One of these things is forgiveness.

It can be so difficult to release ourselves of the anger, hurt, and frustration which naturally accompanies a situation or relationship which requires forgiveness. When we've been wronged, our inherent desire for justice wants the other person to feel an equal amount of anger, hurt, and frustration. However, if you step back and look at it from a distance, you will see that it is not the other person who is suffering from your inability to let things go and forgive, it is YOU who is suffering. You are carrying these hurtful, vengeful emotions and it is poisoning YOU, ruining your moments. You are the one caught up in the indignation of how things should be; your heart is the one carrying the burden of the injustice. Your focus and attention on these intrusive thoughts and feelings aren't touching the object of your displeasure, but they are chipping away at your own opportunities for happiness moment-to-moment.

Think about the relief you could feel through forgiveness. Picture the lightness in letting go of old patterns of believing that someone else is responsible for your happiness. YOU hold the key to your happiness. Things can happen that are unjust, that are hurtful, and that by all accounts seem designed to relieve you of your happiness. But only YOU get to decide if that's true. You are in control of holding on to that hurt or releasing it through forgiveness.

It is not necessary to even involve the other person/people in your effort to forgive. Don't feel you need to call them up and let them know everything is water under the bridge. Forgiveness comes from inside your heart, and when you are ready to forgive the important thing is for you to really put the energy into it from within. In my own experience, I have needed to ask for divine help to give me extra strength to really work to get to a place of forgiveness. In those cases, through meditation I asked for the grace to see the divinity in the other person and the blessing of being able to let that thing go that I had been clinging to. It is also immensely helpful to send love energetically to the person in question. Remember that space and time are just an illusion, and energetic thoughts are very real and powerful.

Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash

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11/5/2018 2 Comments

The Gap

The last couple of weeks I have listened to at least four people talking about how suffering is caused by expectations not meeting reality. As I was thinking about the topic of my next blog post (now called this blog post), I considered writing about that concept but because I keep hearing it expressed in so many various forms I nearly let the idea pass because it seemed so unoriginal. But then I reminded myself that I am living my own unique life, just as anyone who is reading this post is living his/her unique life, and the fact that I keep hearing it may just mean that the universe is trying to inspire me to pass that truth on rather than it meaning that everyone else is also already getting hit hard with this message.

So, in that light let's talk about expectations. The nuts and bolts of this truth is that suffering is caused by a gap between what we expect and what is our "reality" (I put reality in quotes because many - dare I say all - enlightened beings say that true reality is beyond this world, and the material plane we are living in is a dream, or a type of school in which we have come to experience certain truths for the growth of our eternal selves. This is a bigger topic than can be properly addressed as an aside!). So, when we think something (or someone) should be a certain way but is not, our suffering occurs because instead of accepting what is our attention is turned to what isn't.

Clearly the solution to this suffering is so obvious I don't really need to keep going. When we are faced with such a gap, we rigidly dig in our heels and stand firm in our belief about what we think should be, until the circumstances alter themselves and reshape into our desires. "Do you hear me, undesirable circumstances?!"

Ooorrrrr, we can remain fluid and accept reality as it is. This is not the same as passivity. It's not accepting the possibility or responsibility of making things better. It is being present, acknowledging reality, and understanding what is within our control and worth the energy and what isn't. I may not be happy with current political events, for instance. There are certain things in that sphere which are not in my control. I can't really have any impact on any votes outside of anyone in my inner circle who is undecided and is influenced by my opinions. This is pretty much no one, because I don't really have a lot of "undecideds" in my realm - much less enough to push any election, no matter how small! I can volunteer for a candidate who I felt passionate about. I can canvas neighborhoods. I can take certain actions that can help move the future in a direction politically that I agree with. And, of course, I can vote (TOMORROW!) with my conscious. But I can't change the last election and how it has impacted current events since then. I can't change the crazy stories that come out of Washington (and Twitter) with whiplash speed. I can control how much attention I pay to those stories. I can control how many times I open my news app on my phone, or how many breaking news interruptions are enough, how much 24 hour news is gracing my television. Limiting the depth of my consumption of news that frustrates me is something I can control, and it directly relates to the amount of suffering I feel by way of anger, frustration, confusion, and disbelief (which you could say is an inability to accept what is). In that same vein, I can understand the importance of good journalism and support it financially to make sure there is continued accountability, even if I know it just doesn't serve me to consume as much of it as they'd like me to.

Again, acceptance of present circumstances is not the same as being steamrolled. It is not being a prisoner of circumstance. It is also not being a prisoner of our desires. The acceptance needs to be accompanied by taking stock of what is within our control, and then taking needed action.

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