The role of spiritual practice is basically to exhaust the seeker. If the practice does what it’s supposed to do, it exhausts our energy for seeking, and then reality has a chance to present itself.
- Adyashanti
Being human, we are constantly broken apart by experience. to reconcile our humanness means we are ever learning how to accept our suffering and restore our Wholeness. We are often distracted into thinking we can solidify ourselves against being broken or that we can sidestep suffering. Both are impossible. We are fated by this incarnation to come apart and to be put back together. It is the opening and closing along the way that holds the secrets, and there is no other way to that wisdom than to be fully human and to accept where that leads.
- Mark Nepo
Experience for humans can be what erosion is for the elements. Try as we do to fight it, we are worn to our beauty, a season at a time. - Mark Nepo
Sooner or later we are shown that life is one ongoing conversation. And none of what matters reveals itself unless we stop to listen. When you feel you can’t listen any more, listen some more. When you feel you can’t take any more, let more in. When you feel you can’t give any more, let one more thing go. All of this is the work of being human, from which none of us are exempt.
This is a good time to ask:
What do you do when you’re weary?
What do you do when beauty is close and you feel numb?
How firm is your trust in life these days? If wavering, how can you restore that trust?
Are your connecting points to life dislodged?
Are you being moved along or are you being opened up?
Are you letting fresh experience enter and combine, or are you obsessed with sorting and analyzing what comes your way?
Are you able to listen and receive, or are you observing and manipulating? We all do both.
- Mark Nepo
How then do we reach for the light and stand in the light? In the face of life’s vast, impenetrable power, how do we not vanish? How do we not let existence crush us? How do we live in the open together? How do we - today, now, in every breath - try, by being real, to find our membership in the cosmic and global community that is greater than any one self?
I suggest that we don’t achieve or arrive at these states, but that we keep enlivening the presence of our soul by staying in relationship with ourselves, each other, and the Whole.
- Mark Nepo
Exhausted
Weary
Dreary
Teary
“Fight these states”, they say, “don’t let them in”
Lighten Up!
Toughen Up!
Rise Up!
Can you imagine telling
the clouds not to release their rain,
the night not to shadow the earth,
the rock to resist being worn into sand?
Yet this is what we repeatedly tell ourselves
and the telling, in itself, is
Exhausting.
Will we ever become exhausted enough to
stop fighting,
stop trying,
and stop seeking?
So exhausted that we simply collapse into the embrace of stillness
and we Rest
And we See
And we Hear
The Truth?
We are Enough.
- Patti Wardlaw