Monday, July 15, 2013

Sharon Salzberg: Opening to Suffering Wakes Us Up


It's easy to be unconscious. It takes something very compelling to turn us around, to turn us away from all the easy, complacent answers society offers us about how to live.

Opening to our own suffering can lead us to try to seek a better way, a more meaningful life, and a deeper understanding. It's like a call to awakening to not spend our lives defined by someone else's determination of what our limits are, to not mindlessly live out the conventional understandings. It propels us to comprehend what lies behind the closed doors of others' lives, to be willing to see their joys and their sorrows, and to be motivated by a powerful commitment to support the highest possible happiness for them and for us. Opening to suffering wakes us up to compassion and kindness.

Any degree of suffering can be experienced as overwhelming, a sealed room from which we see no protruding edge to provide a toehold and facilitate escape. Compassion gives us that toehold, allowing us to use our own pain and our witness of the pain of others as a vehicle for connection rather than isolation. It allows us to open rather than close down, to have an entirely different understanding of the possibility of a special kind of happiness, even in painful and challenging times, and of the role kindness plays in realizing it. 


- Sharon Salzberg
from The Force of Kindness: Change Your Life with Love & Compassion

 

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