Anger is adrenaline. Like sugar, it lasts as long as it receives external strokes, validation to keep it going. But in the end, it needs fuel. It demands to be constantly fed and when you cant feed it, it consumes you. The burden of anger always belongs to the one carrying it.
Most anger is projection. I am angry therefore I resonate with the things that feed my anger. You think the cure is in ending the provocation, but it’s not. It’s in ending the ability of the provocation to elicit a response in you. The origin and end is always in us
A philosophy based on anger, need, fear of elimination, grasping is a self fulfilling prophecy.
Why is forgiveness so powerful? We imagine it as letting people get away without consequences. Forgiveness is removing the power the provocateur has over you. They become powerless because anger is your dance to their tune. As long you keep dancing, you are not free of them
We release ourselves and in doing so we release those who hurt us. Eventually they see they don’t affect us and stop. If they don’t stop we see them caught in their cyclic misery and offer compassion. In doing so we become greater than those who hurt us. This is the high road
On the high road, we find another path, other things to focus on. Acts that provoked us no longer matter, so distant they become specks in our past, memories we can learn from to propel our better actions. We feel sorry for those still where we left them. This is moving on.
The better life does not come from staying stuck in an irretrievable past, an undoable injustice, but in using it to better ways of doing and being. The hurt others send us lives in us, bodily, in the mind, and in the memory. What we transform it into is the channel we become.
This is empowerment.
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More cultural appropriation. Vipassana anapanasati and pranayama are mumbo jumbo until a lab in a western university has observed your amygdala, made a podcast on it and built a career out of it. As my rinpoche said when I questioned my reluctance to follow up with my PhD/MA: 'do… https://t.co/JSVqGeqj87twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
By all means use these systems. They are meant for everyone and the Buddha was the original open source code. But since it is the western system that invented ipr patents citations and makes money & builds careers off them, then admit nothing you're selling is your own
You are also stripping these techniques of their philosophical basis which means you a) haven't understood them b) don't know the impact on aspects of the mind you haven't studied c) are using swords to slice cheese.
Whichever startup founder/VC needs to hear this: there is dire need for a hospital buddy aggregator. As more and more people live alone, someone to go with them, hold their hand as they wait for results, fill forms, contact kin. With more difficult illnesses impersonality helps
Often friends get overwhelmed and make it about themselves, patients don't want to tell family esp parents or relatives older than themselves, there is an obligation to keep saying 'im fine' when one is not fine. And yet, it would be nice to have someone practical and firm around
hospitals involve running around. when one is being diagnosed with an illness, one doesn't need the added burden of looking around and feeling everyone has someone here but me. yet, this is a reality for many. if you must create millions from an app, make it off this. do good.
you'd accept status quo for many situations. It can be easier to feel tired, comfortable, remain in a vacuum, rut. pain however, the moment you feel pain you need to change something. no one wants to feel pain. you start working to reduce it.
Therefore pain is an agent of change
and therefore dukkha is a Noble Truth. It is inextricably built into your experience of the world, an entrapment, that leads you to the Truth of Impermanence. And thus to Truth. Pain becomes the impetus by which you gain the View.
I asked the Teacher whether any state of mind is (from the mental health pov) 'abnormal'.
Any mind that is not aligned to anitya, annata, shunyata is abnormal.
What this means in a simpler earthy sense is: a mind that does not seek a solution to pain needs an intervention.
everyone's all excited about the 'most romantic day of the year' (tonight/tomorrow morning) but in the sidereal, Jupiter & Venus conjunct in Pisces w Saturn's aspect on them, which is the significator of war/natural disaster because the benefics are *malefic to each other* here
Shukra, Venus is advisor of the asuras, and Jupiter, advisor to the gods. Pisces is Jupiter's sign but Venus is exalted here. So basically your enemy gets into your house when you're chilling and is in charge of it. So naturally, you're pissed off. This is the state of affairs
high risk of earthquakes and flooding near rivers or inundation by sea. because of simultaneous expansion and contraction. what is below the earth and what is expansive in heaven clash. in a water sign. subterranean, undercurrents rise. sorry to be a damp squib on a 'happy' day.
but seriously, #janhitmeinjari focussing on an emotion strengthens it. if you want to not grow an emotion (like anger), you have to not give it a source of resonance within you, response. when the provocation doesn't meet a hook, it falls away. focussing on it cultivates the hook twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Buddhist systems: dont give the anger or thoughts of anger a peg to hang its hat on. dont invite it in and serve it tea
emotion/thoughts focussed systems: oh anger, come in, come in, stay for dinner. oh you want to stay over? sure. oh, wait, what, you're moving in now?
what you give prominence is prominent. if you want it not to be prominent, don't focus on it, (its sources, causes, expressions). dont give it sunlight and water its roots.
Instead: 1) shift focus to physical sensation 2) observe its inherent impermanence
& thus disempower it
some people come into your life to birth things.
a project. a job. a connection. a hand when you need it. the bus guy who drove you to school every morning. and poof! they're gone. you dont even think about them.
they are also soulmates. from some lifetime, another mother.
this is what we refer to in buddhism when we say 'All My Mothers' (there are also other philosophical meanings).
It's deeply comforting. nothing we do, we do alone. also, those you have loved in any lifetime have never entirely left you. like energy, they linger to protect & aid
the mother you had when you were a bug, or a sparrow, or a leaf (the tree!), a cat or a dog, or a cow or a horse, or in that life when you were another gender, another kind of person... all your mothers continue in this continuum to birth you into being.