Space

Yesterday I was reading a transcribed talk by Dzigar Kongtrul and it hit me pretty hard so I thought I would share.  He says that we should meet our reactions and their fruition with awareness.  Seeing the way we behave with humor and gentleness creates space between us and our habitual patterns.  He emphasizes that we shouldn’t take a puritanical approach and say that samsara is bad.  Giving samsara a name like “bad” or “unpleasant” or even “joyful” is conceptual, thus we make some personal investment in samsara and use samsara’s suffering to confirm our own existence.  I think my fundamentalist upbringing makes this approach a deeply ingraned pattern of self-aggression that I constantly have to work with. There are many times that I start evaluating myself and putting all kinds of labels on parts of my experience, but the label actually denies the basic goodness that lies beneath that particular experience.  Lonliness is a common label that I use. Being alone is a universal aspect of the human dynamic and an expression of basic goodness.  Using the label ”lonliness” implies that there is something wrong that requires fixing. Being alone isn’t a problem, in fact, it seems to be an amazing oppourtunity to take some time to create space in our lives.  So let us all dance in expanse of spacious mind and breathe the fresh air of the feminine principle.