Wonderful Retreat

   No, it wasn't a quilting retreat, but I do hope some day that I will get to attend one of those!

   This was a weekend workshop that I attended at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health located in the Berkshire region of Massachusetts.  It is a wonderful, inspiring place in a beautiful setting.

 About a month ago, an aquaintance recommended this book:

   I have read many self-improvement and self-help books in my [45] years, but this one really resonated with me.  I was able to access my deepest, darkest inner wounds that have been buried for years and was too afraid to face.  Avoiding the real issues was causing me to suffer, and in turn, it was affecting my husband and children, too.  The book and workshop helped me embrace and accept the difficult, painful emotions that I've been running away from for so long.

"Feeling compassion for ourselves in no way releases us from responsibility for our actions.  Rather, it releases us from the self-hatred that prevents us from responding to our life with clarity and balance."  (p207)

"The unfaced and unfelt parts of our psyche are the source of all neurosis and suffering" 

      -- Carl Jung (p. 57)

"We can't honestly accept an experience unless we see clearly what we are accepting. ...[C]ompassion is our capacity to relate in a tender and sympathetic way to what we perceive.  Instead of resisting our feelings of fear or grief, we embrace our pain with the kindness of a mother holding her child."  (p. 28)

"... the Buddha nature that is our essence remains intact, no matter how lost we may be.  The very nature of our awareness is to know what is happening.  The very nature of our heart is to care.  Like a boundless sea, we have the capacity to embrace the waves of life as they move through us.  Even when the sea is stirred up by the winds of self-doubt, we can find our way home.  We can discover, in the midst of the waves, our spacious and wakeful awareness."  (p. 30)

a beautiful Elm tree

"... times of great suffering can become times of profound spiritual insight and opening."  (p. 37)

"The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change"  

     -- Carl Rogers (p. 38)

There is a brokenness

out of which comes the unbroken,

a shatteredness

out of which comes the unshatterable.

There is a sorrow

beyond all grief which leads to joy

and a fragility

out of whose depths emerges strength.

There is a hollow space

too vast for words

through which we pass with each loss,

out of whose darkness

we are sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound

whose serrated edges cut the heart 

as we break open to the place inside

which is unbreakable and whole, 

while learning to sing. 

-- Rashani, 1991

If you are interested in learning more about this book and its author (Tara Brach), you can visit her website here.