8 Beyond Pain
Can you see your limitations and still be content?
You can only get really close to yourself when you are content with yourself.
As long as you’re human you will be subject to limitation, but whether that hurts you or not is your choice.
Becoming other is the movement of self; being present is the silence of love.
The self is always moving, or trying to move, in one direction – towards itself.
Love also moves, but away from, not towards the self.
Until you are friendly with yourself you will never change.
When you fear yourself, you try to get distance from what you fear, but like your shadow it never leaves.
Being friendly means putting fear aside, rather than putting what you fear aside.
If you can relax in the face of pain, that is a way of not being governed by it.
Pain is but a small problem, the real problem is that we let the fear it gives rise to run our lives.
To become tense when there is pain, that is the way to increase it.
Can you look, not without naming, but without holding or denying?
Naming, the movement of the past, arises automatically, the question is: what is your relationship to it?
When you truly love something you neither hold it nor deny it, do you? You simply be.
When you listen without reaction to the world, you are learning how to listen to yourself.
When you know how to listen to yourself you will know how to listen to others.
When you can listen like this, you will be a source of healing in the world.
If you have learned to be sensitive you must also learn to let go.
Letting-go is not pushing-away, which would be aversion; and sensitivity is not sensuality, which is acquisitive.
Sensitivity by itself simply increases the pain; letting go by itself would just be indifference – these two must complement each other in the compassionate heart.
The compassionate heart is open to pain, but closed to fear.
For those who have experienced this inner peace the desire arises for it to continue: but to allow it to be interrupted is the only way for it to continue.
True inner peace must never be reliant on outward circumstance.
The fruit of the practice is a quiet mind, but this should not be confused with the joy of equanimous living which is the fruit of understanding.