Day 32

For various reasons related to being ill and my children being ill, three days out of the past week I have not met my goal of sitting for 20 minutes. One of these days, I was on the cusion for fifteen minutes, once only two minutes, and once not at all. Guilt has come up, because I have vowed to do these 108 days, but it has not haunted me to the point where I become angry with myself and my failures. I am sorry if it disappoints you that I have not been able to follow perfectly through, but I often think of these words of Pema Chödron's, and Rick Fields' poem which she quotes:

Vast Blue Sky (https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=195137211427&id=27357898219 Dec 11, 2011)

par Pema Chodron, vendredi 4 décembre 2009, 05:14

I was doing an interview with Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche recently, and I asked him the question: "Rinpoche, you have been living in the west for some time now, and you know western people well. What do you think is the most important advise you could give to a western dharma practitioner?"

And he said "I think the most important thing that western dharma practitioners need to understand is guiltlessness."

I said "guiltlessness?"

He said "Yes. You have to understand that even though you make a lot of mistakes and you mess up in all kinds of ways, all of that is impermanent and shifting and changing and temporary. But fundamentally, your mind and heart are not guilty. They are innocent."

So guiltlessness is very important in the subject of dissolving or burning up the seeds of aggression in our own hearts and our own minds.

Most of the striking out at other people, for us in this culture, comes from feeling bad about ourselves. It makes us so wretched and so uncomfortable that it sets off the chain reaction of trying to get away from that feeling. It's some very very habitual thing that happens.

If you got hooked, and then someone was to give you four seconds, or a minute, and then tap you on the shoulder and ask you what that feels like, it feels really bad, it feels like "bad me" and the aggression is turned against yourself.

Maybe if you waited four minutes and tapped them on the shoulder, what it feels like is - they are really wrong, and they did this to me, and its their fault that I'm in this situation.

But somehow, if at that moment, you were to pause, and start breathing and let the whole thing unwind and unravel, and hang out in the impermanent yet ineffable space - if you were to do that you might realize that all of this blaming of other people, when you went into it deeper, you would see that the seed of it was really some deep discomfort and aggression about yourself.

And if you went more deeply into that, you would probably find sadness.

And I quote this so much, this Poem of Rick Fields, where he said:

Behind the hardness there is fear
And if you touch the heart of the fear
You find sadness (it sort of gets more and more tender)
And if you touch the sadness
You find the vast blue sky