I found myself praying: “May I love and accept myself just as I am.
In anguish and desperation, I reached out as I had many times before to the presence I call the Beloved. This unconditionally loving and wakeful awareness had always been a refuge for me.
I was manipulating my inner experience rather than being with what was actually happening.
Stepping out of the busyness, stopping our endless pursuit of getting somewhere else, is perhaps the most beautiful offering we can make to our spirit.
The belief that we are deficient and unworthy makes it difficult to trust that we are truly loved
Awakening self-compassion is often the greatest challenge people face on the spiritual path.
As I noticed feelings and thoughts appear and disappear, it became increasingly clear that they were just coming and going on their own. . . . There was no sense of a self owning them.
When someone says to us, as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, “Darling, I care about your suffering,” a deep healing begins.
Observing desire without acting on it enlarges our freedom to choose how we live.
But this revolutionary act of treating ourselves tenderly can begin to undo the aversive messages of a lifetime.
The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.
What would it be like if I could accept life–accept this moment–exactly as it is?
On this sacred path of Radical Acceptance, rather than striving for perfection, we discover how to love ourselves into wholeness.
Pain is not wrong. Reacting to pain as wrong initiates the trance of unworthiness. The moment we believe something is wrong, our world shrinks and we lose ourselves in the effort to combat the pain.
True refuge is that which allows us to be at home, at peace, to discover true happiness. The only thing that can give us true refuge is the awareness and love that is intrinsic to who we are. Ultimately, it’s our own true nature.
My prayer became ‘May I find peace… May I love this life no matter what.’ I was seeking an inner refuge, an experience of presence and wholeness that could carry me through whatever losses might come.
Buddhist practices offer a way of saying, ‘Hey, come back over here, reconnect.’ The only way that you’ll actually wake up and have some freedom is if you have the capacity and courage to stay with the vulnerability and the discomfort.
If our hearts are ready for anything, we are touched by the beauty and poetry and mystery that fill our world.
I decided to write ‘True Refuge’ during a major dive in my own health. Diagnosed with a genetic disease that affected my mobility, I faced tremendous fear and grief about losing the fitness and physical freedom I loved.