It is natural for the immature to harm others. Getting angry with them is like resenting a fire for burning.~ Shantideva
Good evening and welcome to Monday Group Meditation, we will be sitting from 7:30 to 10:00 PM EST. It is not necessary to sit for the entire extended time, which is set up to make it convenient for people in four North American Time Zones; sit for as long as you like and when it is most convenient for you.
Monday Group Meditation is open to everyone, believers and non-believers of all stripes who are interested in gathering in silence. If you are new to meditation and would like to try it for yourself, Mindful Nature gave a good description of one way to meditate in an earlier diary, copied and pasted below:
"It is a matter of focusing attention mostly. In many traditions, the idea is to sit and focus on the rising and falling of the breath. Not controlling it, but sitting in a relaxed fashion and merely observing experiences of breathing, sounds, etc. Be aware of your thoughts, but don't engage in them. When your mind wanders (it will, often), then return to focus on breath and repeat."
People who are extremely deluded and deep in suffering can use people unconsciously, completely without malicious intent, never realizing or caring that what they are doing is harmful.
Sometimes we find ourselves locked in destructive relationships with people, who in their deep suffering inflict profound injuries simply in their effort to try to maintain some level of comfort in their day to day lives. Just how do we get past these injuries? We might think when we finally get the courage to leave these relationships our troubles are over, but actually the healing journey is just beginning.
In my own experience, forgiving other people has not been my problem. For a very long time I’ve been stuck on accepting my own feelings of anger; I’ve been trying to meet my anger with kindness and gentleness, but unfortunately as soon as the anger comes up so does a wall of resistance. How dare I be angry when that other person is suffering so deeply?
Finally, this week something happened that helped me open to my experience. It was really just a new idea simply put, that in order to be awake we have to be absolutely and utterly honest with ourselves about everything that is arising in us. That really is all it took for me to have the courage to let my anger rise, and what happened was really quite shocking. Upon allowing the wave of anger to come up, it was immediately followed by a wave of compassion that rose with the thought, “How could you NOT be angry?” Like so many things in life, acceptance relied on the ability to hold a paradox, that yes the person who hurt me did so from deep suffering, and it's OK to accept and allow my own suffering too.
So for me, hopefully, with a new vocabulary perhaps there is a place to rest in new way of being, honestly accepting and being willing to explore what ever is arising within me at any given moment. As long as I inhabit this body I understand the thoughts, the feelings, the messiness will continue to arise, my goal is to be absolutely honest with myself about whatever that is, the good and the bad, light and dark, what brings comfort and what brings discomfort.
I can't claim stability or integration of this new understanding, and I might feel a little over exposed, however I'm offering up my experience only in case it might help someone else. That very simple statement, "If we want to be awake we need to be utterly honest with ourselves about everything that arises within us," was enough to cut through a lifetime of conditioning in me. And in years of study and practice, I don't believe I've ever heard it expressed just like that. Finally it never stops amazing me that something as ephemeral as an idea can move a mountain of resistance.
People are not really nuisances at all. They are just being themselves given their circumstances.~ Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche