Parinama

    The ego is threatened, competitive, and stressed, whereas the soul is drawn more toward surprise, spontaneity, the new, and the fresh. John O’Donohue, Anam Cara   After a certain point in life, the egoic urges and concerns become an impediment to living out our dharma, our deeper purpose in life.   Where ego sees fear in change, the soul remains curious and open.   Where the ego seeks to impose its will on things, the soul longs to become a partner with the flow of life. Where ego takes everything personally, the soul experiences intimacy with life’s unfolding.   The egoic part of the self does not feel real unless it is getting attention, recognition, adoration from the outer world.   The loss of these things feels like an annihilation. And yet, when the outer accolades and praise falls away, and we enter into a kind of darkness, there is the chance to find inside the true source of belonging in the world.   Our most profound lo...

  We will all be asked to carry a certain amount of grief in our lives.   The heartbreak of grief can feel overwhelming and far too much to bear.   But the grief we carry is the price of love. And when we give it space, soften into it, and allow it to soften us, this grief can help us to find purpose and meaning in life.   I am grieving the loss of my mother’s comprehension of things.   Her confusion which became apparent to me about five years ago is slowly gathering steam.   She is less able to cover it up but she keeps trying.   This week she failed her driving test.   I need to help her sell the car, get a new ID, find other ways to get around.   Because her brain decline includes an erasure of emotions, she hasn’t expressed much of anything about the loss of driving.   This loss of emotions is something that is most painful to me because it cuts me off from a deeper connection with her.      ...

    “In shifting our orientation from the ego to the Self, there comes a point where we must allow certain aspects of our being or our lives to “die” so to speak.   Caroline Myss points out that many of us come to this kind of death through an archetypal betrayal experience…Regardless of the supposed cause or source of this “betrayal”, we come to discover that some aspect of our reality is no longer serving our growth and that it must be discarded or replaced.” Gitte Bechsgaard, The Gift of Consciousness   We will all face “betrayal” in some form or another in our lives.   The lost job, the cheating lover, the illness, the devastation. In small and large ways, life will not turn out as we had hoped and prayed.   For the part of us that identified with what was lost, the ego, the betrayal can feel like an annihilation.   The ego is the part of ourselves that experiences life as separate and autonomous from the flow of life that runs through al...

  The bitter and lucid joys of solitude. The real desert is this: to face the limitations of one’s own existence and knowledge and not try to manipulate them or disguise them. Not to embellish them with possibilities. To simply set aside all possibilities other than those that are actually present and real, here and now. And then to choose or not, as one wishes, knowing that no choice is a solution to anything but merely a step further into a slightly changed context of other, very few, very limited, very meaningless concrete possibilities. To realize that one’s whole life, eveybody’s life is really like that.   But in solitude when accurate limitations are seen and accepted, they then vanish, and a new dimension opens-up. The present is in fact, in itself, unlimited.   Thomas Merton, Learning to Love   At the core of the yogic disciplines and the wisdom contemplative traditions is the process of involution, drawing the senses of percep...