The following passage from Charlotte Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen – Love & Work exemplifies the path I’m now following:
“Disasters do happen and our pictures of how our lives should be are blown away. Then we have a choice: do we face the disaster directly and make it our practice or do we run once again, learning nothing and compounding our difficulties? If we want a life that’s peaceful and productive, what do we need? We need the ability (which we learn slowly and unwillingly) to be the experience of our life as it is. Most of the time I don’t want to do that, and I suspect that you don’t either. But that is what we’re here to learn…The more we have experienced life in all its guises as being OK, the less we are motivated to turn away from it in an illusory search for perfection.”
Facing my life and not running from its truth is the most difficult and most important change in perspective I can undertake.
