Quotes About Struggle

I feel gratitude to the Buddha for pointing out that what we struggle against all our lives can be acknowledged as ordinary experience. Life does continually go up and down. People and situations are unpredictable and so is everything else. Everybody knows the pain of getting what we don't want: saints, sinners, winners, losers. I feel gratitude that someone saw the truth and pointed out that we don't suffer this kind of pain because of our personal inability to get things right.

a psychotic person is drowning in the very same things that a mystic swims in.

addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can't stand it.

The Buddha spoke a lot about the importance of working with one's ego. But what did he mean by "ego"? There are various ways to talk about this word, but one definition I particularly like is "that which resists what is." Ego struggles against reality, against the open-endedness and natural movement of life. It is very uncomfortable with vulnerability and ambiguity, with not being quite sure how to pin things down.

This pattern is what we observe in many difficult situations. For instance, if someone is very ill, everyone pulls together to help, but if the illness goes on for a year or two, people start pulling away because they're not up for that much.

What a predicament! We seem doomed to suffer simply because we have a deep-seated fear of how things really are. Our attempts to find lasting pleasure, lasting security, are at odds with the fact that we're part of a dynamic system in which everything and everyone is in process.

Another word for this is freedom—freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.

feel gratitude to the Buddha for pointing out that what we struggle against all our lives can be acknowledged as ordinary experience. Life does continually go up and down.

Disappointment, embarrassment, and all the places where we cannot feel good are a sort of death... It's actually a sign of health that when we meet the place we are about to die, we feel fear and trembling.

The mind is always seeking zones of safety, and these zones of safety are continually falling apart.

From this point of view, the only time we ever know what's really going on is when the rug's been pulled out and we can't find anywhere to land. We use these situations either to wake ourselves up or to put ourselves to sleep.

So when I would start to become depressed, I would remember, "Now wait a minute. Maybe I just have to figure out how to rouse myself genuinely, because there are a lot of people suffering like this, and if I can do it, they can do it.

to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will. It's going to stick around until you learn your lesson, at any rate. You can leave your marriage, you can quit your job, you can only go where people are going to praise you, you can manipulate your world until you're blue in the face to try to make it always smooth, but the same old demons will always come up until finally you have learned your lesson, the lesson they came to teach you.

The waves just keep coming and knocking you down, but you stand up again and with some sense of rousing yourself, standing up.

In reality, when you feel depressed, lonely, betrayed, or any unwanted feelings, this is an important moment on the spiritual path. This is when real transformation can take place.

We seem doomed to suffer simply because we have a deep-seated fear of how things really are.

Mud, raised by hurricanes, wells up in the noblest and purest of hearts.

I feel anger and I feel understanding. It's a difficult position to be in.

Angry men have little to live for when their rage becomes ineffective.

I suppose theres an anger in all of us. Some hidden rage that you keep at bay.

Every present anger derives from past weakness.

There is no fury like that against one who, we fear, may succeed in making us disloyal to beliefs we hold with passion, but have not really won.

Anguish devours the mind, and furious rage, and hope than which the heart can bear no heavier burden, when it is long deferred.