Dharma and thoughts to you and have a merry and blessed weekend. Love heart to heart, Miguel

Our practice should be without effort, without strain,
without attempts to control or force and without trying to become 'peaceful'. If
we find that we are disturbing ourselves in any of these ways, we stop
meditating and simply rest or relax for a while. Then we resume our
meditation.

-Dilgo Khentse Rinpoche

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Looking at Suffering

In Buddhist practice, we investigate the nature of suffering. One of the first things we may notice is our relationship to it. We may discover how we tolerate, avoid, or accept suffering in unhealthy ways. We may notice our aversion to suffering, which creates even more suffering.We may also notice how suffering functions in our lives. We might be using it as proof of or justification for inappropriate judgments about ourselves: e.g., that we are blameworthy, inadequate, or incapable. Identifying strongly with our suffering can become our orientation to the world. Occasionally people hang on to the identity “I'm a victim,” and want to be treated by others as a victim. We can use our suffering to get other people to respond to us in ways that may not be healthy.

However, being willing to investigate suffering and to look at it closely and nonreactively changes our relationship to it. We bring a healthy part of our psyche to the experience of suffering. Instead of being wrapped up in our suffering, lost in aversion to it, or shut off from it, we simply ask: “What is this?”

- Gil Fronsdal, "Living Two Traditions,"

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Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.

~The Buddha

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Our internal experiences need not to be taken too seriously, our experiences are just a play of past memories, thoughts and conditioning in the field of pure awareness. We can naturally Allow feelings and thoughts to come and go with out getting caught up in them or needing to change anything. This is freedom, just this.