the middle way

Bonesthrown Newsletter Archive /// Sent Oct 2 2023

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Chapter 9 /// Six Kinds of Loneliness in When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön

“We hear a lot about the pain of samsara, + we also hear about liberation. But we don't hear much about how painful it is to go from being completely stuck to becoming unstuck. The process of becoming unstuck requires tremendous bravery, b/c basically we are completely changing our way of perceiving reality, like changing our DNA. We are undoing a pattern that is not just our pattern. It's the human pattern…

As human beings not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don't deserve resolution: we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity. To the degree that we've been avoiding uncertainty, we're naturally going to have withdrawal symptoms--withdrawal from always thinking that there's a problem + that someone, somewhere, needs to fix it…”