The Middle-Way

To balance my annual rant on the world and my place in it, I am trying to seek the wisdom of others so I may assess my life within a middle-way perspective. Here are some quotes from Ani Pema Chodron, western Buddhist nun in the Tibetan tradition:


"The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new."

"If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher. "

"We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who's right and who's wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don't like about our associates or our society. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others. Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground."

"People get into a heavy-duty sin and guilt trip, feeling that if things are going wrong, that means that they did something bad and they are being punished. That's not the idea at all. The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings that you need to open your heart. To the degree that you didn't understand in the past how to stop protecting your soft spot, how to stop armoring your heart, you're given this gift of teachings in the form of your life, to give you everything you need to open further. "

"Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us."