Inspiring words from Pema Chodron in the article below, inspired by her article….
Allowing and turning towards the flow of empathy. Sometimes I wish I didn’t feel so much…and then, very quickly now, I catch myself and I feel SO grateful to be able to feel at all.
I would so much rather learn to feel the wild array of human emotion that is available to us, to learn to navigate it and touch it to its core as pure, essential energy, than to close down to life, to be unmoved.
It is understandable why people close down sometimes too. It can be a necessary coping mechanism, the only one available in certain situations. I have been there and sometimes I still go there.. and then I realise that it is a feeling too… somewhere under that sea of numbness is an ocean of feeling and the waves begin to swell and move again…
May we all support each other in this journey of life – showing up as authentically as we can with as much awareness as we are able in each moment. This means being real, allowing ourselves to be raw and owning our RAW.
This means owning our YES as much as our NO. This means seeing ourselves in the eyes of the other and feeling the other in ourselves. Knowing we are the same at the same time as knowing me from you.
This is a dance, a continuously moving dance, motivated by the still point at the core of its choreography. This is an art form in which nothing and everything weigh the same in dreaming, from which emptiness and fullness were born of the same womb, and in which form and formlessness are bound in eternal marriage.
There is no magic formula, no particular way this looks and nothing to hold on to. Simply moments flowing into moments, the unknown stepping into the unknown over and over again, expansion and contraction, life and death all part of the same heart beating.
Embracing the completely hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking, and occasionally infuriating journey of being human <3
“It is fairly common for crisis and pain to connect people with their capacity to love and care about one another. It is also common that this openness and compassion fades rather quickly, and that people then become afraid and far more guarded and closed than they ever were before. The question, then, is not only how to uncover our fundamental tenderness and warmth but also how to abide there with the fragile, often bittersweet vulnerability. How can we relax and open to the uncertainty of it?”…..
“When you touch your sorrow or fear, your anger or jealousy, you are touching everybody’s jealousy, you are knowing everybody’s fear or sorrow. You wake up in the middle of the night with an anxiety attack and when you can fully experience the taste and smell of it, you are sharing the anxiety and fear of all humanity and all animals as well. Instead of your distress becoming all about you, it can become your link with everyone all over the world who is in the same predicament.”
<3
