There is no way to rush healing. The soul, like animals, continues to move at its own pace, according to its own rhythm. This is a source of frustration to our modern minds, which have forgotten how to wait, but it’s the loving inner parent’s task to remind you to shift your focus a few degrees and slip into a new context, one that understands slow living and slow healing. In the space of patience, you will find a place to exhale.
Self-actualization is not a sudden happening or even the permanent result of long effort. The eleventh-century Tibetan Buddhist poet-saint Milarepa suggested: “Do not expect full realization; simply practice every day of your life.” A healthy person is not perfect but perfectible, not a done deal but a work in progress. Staying healthy takes discipline, work, and patience, which is why our life is a journey and perforce a heroic one.
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In fact, in many ways it’s more vulnerable to feel good, because when you’re feeling good, you have something to lose, and the ego fears nothing more than loss. Therefore, in order to learn to say yes more often to the vulnerability of life in the present moment, we need to explore the natural resistance that arises when we’re feeling good.
And we must know that transcendence is not the goal and is not, in fact, separate from the pain and loneliness, the fear and vulnerability that define being human.
Life can be a painful journey. For some, especially those with a wide-open heart, pain is a part of daily life. We don’t even have to know why we’re crying, but when we slow down and soften, we find that a layer of sadness sits in the middle of an open heart. We try to escape this “genuine heart of sadness,” as Pema Chödrön describes it, but there’s no escape, because life includes pain. If you’re someone whose heart hasn’t been hardened over, you will be highly attuned to this pain on a daily, and sometimes hourly, basis. There’s no getting over life; we must learn to go through it.