Quotes to contemplate...
"...we have to be willing to come apart at the seams, to be dismantled, to let our old ego structures fall apart before we can begin to embody sparks of the essential perfection at the core of our nature. To evolve spiritually, we have to allow these unworked, hidden, messy parts of ourselves to come to the surface...
So there are two main ways that people try to abort this porcess: running away and spiritual bypassing.
Fleeing the raw, wounded places in ourselves because we don't think we can handle them is a form of self-rejection and self-abandonment that turns our feeling body into an abandoned, haunted house. The more we flee our shadowy places, the more they fester in the dark and the more haunted this house becomes. And the more haunted it becomes, the more it terrifies us. This is a vicious circle that keeps us cut off from and afraid of ourselves...Naturally, we want to do everything we can to avoid this place, fix it, or neutralize it, so we'll never have to experience such pain again.
A second way to flee ...is through spiritual bypassing -- using spiritual ideas or practices to avoid or prematurely transcend relative human needs, feelings, personal issues, and developmental tasks. For example, a certain segment of the contemporary spiritual scene has become infected with a facile brand of "advaita-speak", a one-sided transcendentalism that uses nondual terms and ideas to bypass the challenging work of personal transformation.
Advaita-speak can be very tricky, for it uses absolute truth to disparage relative truth, emptiness to devalue form, and oneness to belittle individuality... A deep, intimate connection inevitably brings up all our love wounds from the past. This is why many spiritual practitioners try to remain above the fray and impersonal in their relationships -- so as not to face and deal wtih their own unhealed wounds..." John Welwood, Shambhala Sun, November 2008
“On the most superficial level, perhaps it’s difficult to reside in the experiential world because it’s unfamiliar. We’re not educated to experience, to be present, to inhabit the sensory world. Most of our formal education involves cultivating the thinking process. As well, our culture is oriented towards fostering security and comfort. So just to counteract our years of conditioning, learning how to be present requires repeated practice.” Ezra Bayda, Being Zen
"...we perpetuate our identity by unconsciously barricading ourselves in behaviours that limit our aliveness...Our thoughts of how we should be, which have no immediate reality and, in fact, arise as a reaction to how we feel about ourselves, become more real than our immediate experience. But the unreal can never be the doorway to ourselves...Our energy becomes bound within a circumscribed range of behaviours, feelings and thoughts, and "we" become the expression of the states of consciousness possible within that range. It is what we unconsciously do all the time." Richard Moss
"Compassion is a kind of fire...it disturbs, it surprises, it ignites, it burns, it sears, and it warms. Compassion incinerates denial; it especially warms and melts cold hearts, cold structures, frozen minds, and self-satisfied lifestyles. Those who are touched by compassion have their lives turned upside down. That is not necessarily a bad thing." Matthew Fox
“Often our resistance prevents us from staying in the present moment for more than a few seconds. We resist because we want to avoid feeling the underlying jangle of our actual experience. We move away from discomfort, into the false comfort of our thoughts. But no matter what form it takes, resistance brings no peace; we strengthen whatever we resist. By resisting something, we solidify it, empowering it to stay in our life.” Ezra Bayda, Saying Yes to Life
