Sunday, March 18, 2012

Connected

 
     “Healing for me is connection to my activity itself, the practice of doing each thing for its own sake, and of course, intimacy with other people, plants, the earth and sky, the laundry, the traffic, the commercials, the mundane anguish of daily existence. There’s nothing special or tragic about it; it’s just my life, day in and day out. Even though our lives are nothing special, it’s not easy to penetrate our numbness and become willing to open ourselves up to all the details of our daily lives, including the stress and pain. Because our conditioning to avoid unpleasantness, the hardest thing may not be bearing the unpleasant experiences we have so much as learning how to experience the details of our suffering so thoroughly that ‘suffering,’ ‘stress,’ and ‘pain’ lose their distinctive character and just become our lives, and rich lives at that. We’re usually so caught up in our opinions that we can’t experience things as they are. We’d rather think about how ‘unfair’ something is, or how morally superior we ourselves are, than experience the actual feelings involved in a disappointment at work. But how we open ourselves to feeling, how we embrace all the experiences life has to offer, has a great deal to do with how connected we feel.”

     Cohen D. “Turning Suffering Inside Out: A Zen Approach to Living with Physical and Emotional Pain.” Shambhala, Boston, 2002.


Photo: Kal Biro   www.dpreview.com
 

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