“Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.” 
~Henry David Thoreau

Reading Thich Nhat Hanh this morning, he talked about the necessity of being present with dark emotions.  He said it is necessary to practice, so that when a strong emotion comes, you’re able to lay down and put your hand on your belly and be present with a difficult emotion. He said that we can be like a tree. In a windstorm, the branches and leaves are tossed about; the higher the branches, the more they are affected by the wind. But the trunk and roots remain stable. When we lie down and put our hand on our belly, we are connecting to our solid “trunk” – knowing that the emotion is there, but no longer in turmoil. We are then able to look deeply at the difficult emotion, learn what has caused it in both the past and the present, and understand how best to respond.

In parallel, Tara Brach talked about the difficulty of raising her teenager, who she perceived as addicted to screen time, the violent computer games, and his disregard of homework. She had a notion that she was failing him.  This notion got tied up with her feelings of shame, and then she converted that painful feeling to anger expressed toward her son. She had forgotten her basic tool of taking a pause before moving forward. When she remembered to pause, then she could be present with her son, remind him that the time to do his homework had arrived, and cut through the habitual pattern of expressing her anger at him for her perceived failure.

Most people are afraid of suffering. But suffering is a kind of mud to help the lotus of happiness grow. There can be no lotus flower without the mud. Thich Nhat Hanh

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Brach, Tara. (2003) Radical acceptance: embracing your life with the heart of a Buddha. Bantam Dell:New York
Thich Nhat Hanh.  No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering. Parallax Press:Berkeley, CA
Henry David Thoreau Quotes. (n.d.). Quotes.net. Retrieved October 27, 2020, from https://www.quotes.net/quote/4809.
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