It’s even difficult to hear that what we reject out there is what we reject in ourselves, and what we reject in ourselves is what we are going to rej… - Pema Chödrön

I’d like to encourage us all to lighten up, to practice with a lot of gentleness. This is not the drill sergeant saying, “Lighten up or else.” I have found that if we can possibly use anything we hear against ourselves, we usually do.

Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly. The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last — that they don’t disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security.

IN practicing meditation, we’re not trying to live up to some kind of ideal — quite the opposite.