So good morning.
We're exploring this week compassion,
Authentic self-compassion.
And it's not easy for people to authentically appreciate themselves.
I think it's common to feel disappointed with the trajectory of our life sometimes.
To have regret and to feel at times irrelevant.
So an essential part of this path of practice is to remember and practice loving our life.
All of it.
The Zen teacher Mizumi who passed passed away in the 90s used to tell his students,
Please encourage yourself.
Encourage yourself to appreciate this transient,
Frenzied life as it is.
Whole and self-contained and self-fulfilled.
Encourage yourself to appreciate the whole mess.
The pleasant and the painful.
And here's the rub.
And love what you can't change.
Love what you can't change no matter how debilitating.
It feels pretty natural that our regrets and our guilt and shame and some of the more afflictive emotions,
You know,
They sometimes outweigh the successes and the pleasures of our life.
You know,
Or they they don't outweigh them but they just weigh more heavily,
I think.
And I think it's important to understand that our spiritual depth and our growth and our human shallowness,
They're all kind of inseparable.
You know,
They're found together.
In a sense,
The essence of these Buddhist teachings and really the point of many philosophical teachings is that we are finite beings and given that pain and failure and depression are kind of woven into the fabric of our life.
And to really accept that,
Accept that fact,
Come to terms with it,
That this is how it is to be human.
No matter how much money you have in your bank,
How much experience,
How many experiences you've had,
That there is difficulty,
It's just woven in.
And this is the basis of self-acceptance,
Really.
Self-respect.
And cultivating self-respect is the seed really for awakening,
Living an awakened life.
The past is what it is.
We've all said this.
It is what it is.
We know that.
I am who I am.
And the past may have been a heavy conditioning factor.
And the task is to embrace it.
The whole of my life without revulsion,
Without denial,
The whole of it.
And without this self integration,
We're not really working with who we are.
In a sense,
Without self-acceptance,
We're disabling our chances of skillful transformation.
And it takes discipline.
It's only through disciplined integration of all these dimensions of ourselves that we learn to work through problems that have been debilitating.
The truth of our life is that we have made choices and decisions and aspects of my life I had no role in creating.
You know,
The imprints of my family,
The culture I grew up in,
The long and complicated history of our species.
All of that just happened.
It includes accidents that have befallen me and humiliations and suffering.
And it's not my fault.
And we must embrace,
You know,
What we did in our lives and what we didn't do.
What has been done to us?
What simply happened for whatever reason?
And to regret or deny or resent any part of this,
This life that you've been given is what is known in Buddhism as delusion.
To embrace all of it as the essential content of our life.
The philosopher,
Nietzsche,
I think he said something to the effect of one must learn to love.
And in one of his writings,
He illustrates this with our love of music.
He says that love isn't innate,
But it's cultivated over stretches of time.
So when we listen repeatedly to music,
It becomes part of us.
You know,
You can pull up and recall a song and you start to hum it.
That's how it becomes part of us.
And this is not just with music.
Love is not just acquired in that way.
We all have to learn to love.
Nietzsche says we all have to learn to love everything.
And we love through patience and discipline until gradually a space opens within us for that new love to reside.
He says there's no way even love has to be learned.
I really appreciate this truth.
Even love has to be learned.
Love and appreciation for oneself has to be learned.
I think the true sign of freedom is that we're no longer ashamed of ourselves.
We've learned to love our life and appreciate our life.
We've learned to integrate our shame and regret.
And in turn,
That allows for and opens us to the joy of self acceptance.
That is really our everyday practice.
So thank you for your consideration and your your kind attention.
