( Contributed by Domenic)
Psychology
The quality of your life depends on the seeds you water.
Your mind is like a piece of land planted with many different kinds of seeds: seeds of joy, peace, mindfulness, understanding, and love; seeds of craving, anger, fear, hate, and forgetfulness. These wholesome and unwholesome seeds are always there, sleeping in the soil of your mind. The quality of your life depends on the seeds you water.
The Art of Transforming Suffering
Releasing the Arrow
by Thich Nhat Hanh from No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering
There is a Buddhist teaching found in the Sallatha Sutta, known as The Arrow. It says if an arrow hits you, you will feel pain in that part of your body where the arrow hit; and then if a second arrow comes and strikes exactly at the same spot, the pain will not be only double, it will become at least ten times more intense.
The unwelcome things that sometimes happen in life—being rejected, losing a valuable object, failing a test, getting injured in an accident—are analogous to the first arrow. They cause some pain. The second arrow, fired by our own selves, is our reaction, our storyline, and our anxiety. All these things magnify the suffering. Many times, the ultimate disaster we’re ruminating upon hasn’t even happened. We may worry, for example, that we have cancer and that we’re going to die soon. We don’t know, and our fear of the unknown makes the pain grow even bigger.
The second arrow may take the form of judgment (“how could I have been so stupid?”), fear (“what if the pain doesn’t go away?”), or anger (“I hate that I’m in pain. I don’t deserve this!”). We can quickly conjure up a hell realm of negativity in our minds that multiplies the stress of the actual event, by ten times or even more. Part of the art of suffering well is learning not to magnify our pain by getting carried away in fear, anger, and despair. We build and maintain our energy reserves to handle the big sufferings; the little sufferings we can let go.
Why do we make it so hard?
(Contributed by Mr. Balasunder)
Unconventional Surrender – keeping it simple
Man has become addicted to the drug named ‘intellect’ and under its influence, compulsively analyzes everything, cogitating, speculating and making all simple things complicated.
This addiction, can only be gotten rid of, by unconventional surrender, to the process of pure receptivity.
– Ramesh Balsekar.
( contributed by Mr.Balasunder)
The mythic mind ( Mythos) ponders metaphysical questions while the logical mind (Logos) counts the beans and weighs the odds.
Logos refers to our ordinary way of seeing the world with deductive, logical thinking that helps us balance our checkbook, make decisions, and plan for the future. But as scholar Karen Armstrong describes, the ancients saw that logos cannot “assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life’s struggle. For that people turned to mythos, stories that made no pretensions to historical accuracy but should rather be seen as an early form of psychology.”
Worry is a Misuse of Your Imagination
Something strange happens to us as we grow out of childhood into adolescence and then adulthood. The child that once had not a care in the world, that could get over anything at the drop of a hat, that could let go, move on and overcome anything with a resilience that is rarely found in any adult becomes strikingly different as time passes. Continue reading
Far more important than what you are listening to is the act of listening itself
True listening is another way of bringing stillness into the relationship. When you truly listen to someone, the dimension of stillness arises and becomes an essential part of the relationship. But true listening is a rare skill. Usually, the greater part of a person’s attention is taken up by their thinking. At best, they may be evaluating your words or preparing the next thing to say. Or they may not be listening at all, lost in their own thoughts. Continue reading
A grievance is baggage of old thought and emotion
It requires honesty to see whether you still harbor grievances, whether there is someone in your life you have not completely forgiven, an “enemy.” Continue reading
Consider humor the “Vitamin H” of a healing regime
Develop a Sense of Humor
Defined as the ability to laugh with others, laugh at ourselves, and discover humor in everyday life, a sense of humor is essential as an emotional coping tool. Humor provides a greater capacity to forge through the most adverse of situations.
