Sublime
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redefining my relationship with suffering
sundusalfi.comThrough brutality, something beautiful can arise.
Endings can spark new beginnings.
Defeat brings about victory.
God works through pain to bring redemption.
- Good Friday reflections
Shinzen has this simple formula he will often display while teaching:
Pain x Resistance = Suffering
Pain x Equanimity = Purification
Purification is maybe a big idea, but you can think of it as the undoing of what keeps us closed off to a more expansive and connected state of being or awareness. When we open to pain and allow it to move through us
... See moreJude Star • New Horizons: Innovative Teachers of Awakening - Part 1: Shinzen Young
- Suffering doesn’t block awakening, it catalyzes it. Most people don’t begin their spiritual path because everything is fine. It’s suffering that cracks the surface of the self, but only when we turn toward it with open-heartedness and support does it become the doorway to transcendence. Trauma and revelation aren’t
Trauma, Transcendence, and the Beauty that Breaks Us Open – Integral Life
But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
Viktor E. Frankl • Man's Search for Meaning
It is inevitably true that life is suffering. But the reverse is also true: suffering is life. It is in the midst of suffering that we get to exercise so many of the virtues that make us human. Our sense of courage, justice, compassion, wisdom; all these things manifest and operate in and because of the reality of suffering. All those aspects of
... See moreBarry Magid • Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide
Viktor Frankl • Man's Search for Meaning
Eliza Griswold • Richard Rohr Reorders the Universe
This ignorance of our belonging to the sacredness of life is recognized as the root of suffering.