Going to Pieces without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

The spiritual path means making a path rather than following one.

The only way to find out where I was was to get out of the way and let myself happen.

Stillness does not mean the elimination of disturbances as much as a different way of viewing them.

The mind that realizes its own Buddha nature is said to be like clear space—it is empty and all-pervasive but also vividly aware.

In building a path through the self to the far shore of awareness, we have to carefully pick our way through our own wilderness. If we can put our minds into a place of surrender, we will have an easier time feeling the contours of the land. We do not have to break our way through as much as we have to find our way around the major obstacles. We do not have to cure every neurosis, we just have to learn how not to be caught by them.

With some gratitude, I realized that my awareness was now stronger than my neurosis. This did not mean that things would never go to pieces, only that I did not have to fall apart when they did. In fact, my own ability to go to pieces was protecting me in this situation. I did not have to let my identity as an efficient and together person imprison me.

We do not get lots of realizations in our lives as much as we get the same ones over and over.

Love is the revelation of the other person’s freedom,

I began to think that there was something awesome about my timing. How was it that, at the exact moment of my stopping, such incredible things were happening? It took me longer than I am prepared to admit to realize that such things were always happening. It was only that I was finally paying attention.

What I had learned from Buddhism was that I did not have to know myself analytically as much as I had to tolerate not knowing.

Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.

We are afraid to venture into the unknown because to do so would remind us of how unsafe we once felt.

Intimacy puts us in touch with fragility, he realized, and the acceptance of fragility opens us to intimacy.

Buddhism teaches us that we are not so much isolated individuals as we are overlapping environments, and that we have the capacity to know ourselves in this way.

The more we come to terms with our own separateness, taught the Buddha, the more we can feel the connections that are already there.

Delusion is the mind’s tendency to seek premature closure about something. It is the quality of mind that imposes a definition on things and then mistakes the definition for the actual experience.

In coping with the world, we come to identify only with our compensatory selves and our reactive minds. We build up our selves out of our defenses but then come to be imprisoned by them.

Just as mind rises up and rebels at un unskillful attempt to subdue it in meditation, a relationship will fall apart if the partners are not respectful of each other's differences. <...> Separateness and connection make each other possible; they are not mutually exclusive.

In making a path like the Buddha, we discover our own capacities for relationship. Doing this is like feeling our way in the dark. We need a healthy appreciation for what kind of obstacles we are facing within ourselves, and we need a method for working our way around those obstacles. It is in this sense that the path is the goal - opening leads to further opening. The Buddha's meditative teachings are about finding and incorporating a method around our obstacles.

Separate and together cease to be mutually exclusive and instead become, in psychoanalyst Christopher Bolla's phrase, "reciprocally enhancing and mutually informative.

Joseph made clear, it is not just the mother that has to be released from perfection. It is everything.

I felt silly to be falling into such an obvious trap of letting my expectations interfere with what was actually happening, but I also felt an all-too-familiar sadness creeping up from my chest to my eyes. In the stillness of the retreat I saw how I did this a lot: envisioning how something, or someone, had to be perfect, and then being disappointed when they failed, pulling myself back into a sullen remove.

As the Buddhist traditions always insist, if we look outside of ourselves for relief from our own predicament, we are sure to come up short. Only by learning how to touch the ground of our own emptiness can we feel whole again.

Don’t try to control the breath,” they counselled. “Breathing happens on its own. Let the breath breathe you. Pay attention to whatever sensation, or lack of sensation, you can find.

Implicit and explicit throughout the text is the understanding that meditative wisdom does not have to be isolated from daily life. Our need to expand awareness beyond our isolated egos is as necessary in relationships as it is in meditation.

... everything had changed but nothing was altered.

Like meditation, psychotherapy has the potential to reveal how much of our thinking is an artificial construaction designed to help us cope with an unpredictable world.

Form is emptiness", the Buddhists teach, but form is also form. I would never be able to approach the emptiness of form if I continued to deny myself the experience of it.

The antidote to hatred in the heart, the source of violence, is tolerance. Tolerance is an important virtue of bodhisattvas (enlightened heroes and heroines)—it enables you to refrain from reacting angrily to the harm inflicted on you by others. You could call this practice “inner disarmament,” in that a well-developed tolerance makes you free from the compulsion to counterattack. For the same reason, we also call tolerance the “best armor,” since it protects you from being conquered by hatred itself. THE DALAI LAMA