This beautiful passage explains the struggle and the promise of meditating regularly better than I could. The o's in her name should each have 2 little dots above them. She is an American Buddhist nun, now teaching in Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the first Tibetan monastery in North America.
On Meditation
When we sit down to meditate, we
leave behind the idea of the preferred meditator,
the ideal meditation and
preconceived results.
We train in simply being present.
We open ourselves completely to
the pain and the pleasure of our life.
We train in precision, gentleness and letting go.
Because we see our thoughts
and emotion with compassion,
we stop struggling against ourselves.
We learn to recognize when we’re all
caught up and to trust that we can let go.
Thus the blockages created by
our habits and prejudices
start falling apart.
In this way, the wisdom we are
blocking - the wisdom of
bodhichitta - becomes available.
Pema Chodron
from Awakening the Heart calendar for 2011
The image is the Spirit House at Hope Springs Institute, Peebles, OH, where I my recent two week silence retreat was. spent.
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