Having Thanks For A Mind That Can Reflect!
From Rik Center:
Mindfulness practices are to help us understand why discontentment, stress, anxiety, and suffering happen. It’s not looking to live in blame, seeking revenge, giving up, prove how right or wrong I am or how righteous I can be. The Buddha's teaching of mindful awareness is to help the mind awaken. To see the causes and conditions that create dukkha/suffering, one’s constant discontentment.
This will need the arousing of energy as it will not happen on its own. We must participate in the development of opening our hearts and mind to a deeper wisdom of less suffering. As we develop in this training we come to understand the importance of kindness and compassion toward oneself, the world, and others if we are to liberate our minds and heart. A mindfulness practice must include kindness and compassion toward our past hurts and pains, so thoughts and actions of wholesome skillful intentions arise within us.
Let us cultivate within ourselves the ability to no longer be reactive respondents to life. We learn how to relinquish and move through past hurts so we can be creative partners in our life journey. We train our hearts and mind with kindness and fortitude to recognize the minds thinking patterns, themes, and beliefs we’ve developed that cause suffering and nurture thoughts that lead to non-suffering. Seeking to abandon what has kept us wrapped in a constant looping of discontentment, anger, frustration, and blame is called wisdom.
From Stephen Batchelor: "A compassionate heart still feels anger, greed, jealousy, and other such emotions. But it accepts them for what they are with equanimity, and cultivates the strength of mind to let them arise and pass without identifying with or acting upon them.”
The Buddha's teaching constantly points us to see that all conditions change and are impermanent. Mindful awareness training develops the tools and wisdom to see the truth within this teaching, so that inner joy is not something beyond our reach, though can be found here and now even as we experience the up-downs of living a human life.
From Tibetan Teacher The Venerable Thubten Chodron: “I think this self-acceptance really comes through having a sense of compassion for ourselves, which is built upon separating the action and the person. The idea in self-acceptance is that when we look in the past at the actions that we’ve done, we accept that we have done those, in the sense that that is reality. The way to really gain self-acceptance is to differentiate the person and the action. We can say that an action is destructive or constructive or neutral or whatever it is, but that doesn’t mean the person is good or bad. To really separate those out so that we can give an accurate label to the different actions we do, and then know which ones to rejoice at and which ones to purify.”
From Rik's Book: "By opening the heart to mindful reflective teachings, we gain learning...from the learning, we gain compassion... from compassion, we gain wisdom. When these three aspects blend, we become the architects of a new future in how we respond to the nature of life. We are not changing the characteristics of pain, loss or joy, though transforming how we interact with these experiences."