Quote:
Originally Posted by newtus
Yeah, im too nice. I used to lack a backbone 100%. Im slowly shedding it. I snap a lot now. I hate getting angry to certain levels but if it grows me a backbone...
|
Yeah, when I was younger people were always telling me how "nice" I was. I hated it. I hated the word "nice." It's mushy and weak feeling. And they only thought I was nice because I was quiet, so they assumed niceness.
I don't see you as "nice." I see something deeper and more sensitive. It's a treasure, and I'd hate to see you twist it into something angry and hateful and ugly. And I think it's an utter tragedy of our times that a sensitive young woman is trying to answer the question "who am I?" by trying to figure out which psych label fits her best.
I've been re-reading Pema Chodron's The Places That Scare You. I keep running across whole sections I want to share with you. My hope is that you read them and really think about them and take them to heart. I'm sending them directly to your heart. I think you're at a fork in the road, and you're really tempted to pick the wrong path. I think there's a huge part of you that still hopes someone will show you why the other path is the right one. I hope you attend to that part of yourself. That's your inner wisdom, sanity, strength, beauty, spirituality talking to you. Don't try to silence that voice.
Quote:
p. 3
When I was about six years old I received the essential bodhichitta* teaching from an old woman sitting in the sun. I was walking by her house one day feeling lonely, unloved, and mad, kicking anything I could find. Laughing, she said to me, "Little girl, don't you go letting life harden your heart."
Right there I got this pith instruction: we can let the circumstances of our life harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.
p. 50
It's up to us. We can spend our lives cultivating our resentments and cravings or we can explore the path of the warrior--nurturing open-mindedness and courage. Most of us keep strengthening our negative habits and therefore sow the seeds of our own suffering. The bodhichitta practices, however, are ways for us to sow the seeds of well-being. Particularly powerful are the aspiration practices of the four limitless qualities--loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity.
p. 54-55
Our personal attempts to live humanely in this world are never wasted. Choosing to cultivate love rather than anger just might be what it takes to save the planet from extinction.
What is it that allows our goodwill to expand and our prejudice and anger to decrease? This is a significant question. Traditionally it is said that the root of aggression and suffering is ignorance. But what is it that we are ignoring? Entrenched in the tunnel vision of our personal concerns, what we ignore is our kinship with others. One reason we train as warrior-bodhisattvas is to recognize our interconnectedness--to grow in understanding that when we harm another, we are harming ourselves. So we train in recognizing our uptightness. We train in seeing that others are not so different from ourselves. We train in opening our hearts and minds in increasingly difficult situations.
p. 56
[E]ven in the rock-hardness of rage, if we look below the surface of the aggression, we'll generally find fear. There's something beneath the solidity of anger that feels very raw and sore. Underneath the defensiveness is the brokenhearted, unshielded quality of bodhichitta. Rather than feel this tenderness, however, we tend to close down and protect against the discomfort. That we close down is not the problem. In fact, to become aware of when we do so is an important part of the training. The first step in cultivating loving-kindness is to see when we are erecting barriers between ourselves and others. This compassionate recognition is essential. Unless we understand--in a nonjudgmental way--that we are hardening our hearts, there is no possibility of dissolving that armor. Without dissolving the armor, the loving-kindness of bodhichitta is always held back. We are always obstructing our innate capacity to love without an agenda.
p. 60-61
Because they challenge us to the limits of our open-mindedness, difficult relationships are in many ways the most valuable for practice. The people who irritate us are the ones who inevitably blow our cover. Through them we might come to see our defenses very clearly. Shantieva explained it like this: If we wish to practice generosity and a beggar arrives, that's good news. The beggar gives us an opportunity to learn how to give. Likewise, if we want to practice patience and unconditional loving-kindness and an enemy arrives, we are in luck. Without the ones who irritate us, we never have a chance to practice.
Before Atisha brought the bodhichitta practices from India to Tibet, he was told that the people in Tibet were universally cheerful and kind. He was afraid that if this was the case he'd have no one to provoke him and show him where he needed to train. So he chose to bring along the most difficult person in his life--his Bengali tea boy, who was as skillful at showing him his faults as his guru. The joke is that he didn't really need that Bengali servant. There were plenty of irritating people in Tibet.
|
* bodhi- means 'awake,' 'enlightened,' 'completely open'; chitta means 'mind,' 'heart,' or 'attitude' - I like to visualize an open heart. When I feel my heart closing down to someone or in some situation, I know I've found a spot I need to explore.