Quotes About Struggle

In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keep looking for alternatives.

Reaching our limit is not some kind of punishment. It's actually a sign of health that, when we meet the place where we are about to die, we feel fear and trembling. A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us.

The mind is always seeking zones of safety, and these zones of safety are continually falling apart. Then we scramble to get another zone of safety back together again.

In the early seventies, a friend kept saying to me, 'Whatever you do, don't try to make those feelings go away.' His advice went on: 'anything you can learn about working with your sense of discouragement or your sense of fear or your sense of bewilderment - anything you can do to work with those things - do it., please, because it will be such an inspiration to other people.

BY WEAVING our opinions, prejudices, strategies, and emotions into a solid reality, we try to make a big deal out of ourselves, out of our pain, out of our problems. But things are not as solid, predictable, or seamless as they seem.

Todos nosotros somos en ocasiones un caso perdido.

When we're feeling uncomfortable and irritable and fed up, our thoughts and emotions are probably revolving around something like pain, loss, disgrace, or blame.

We acknowledge our aversions and our cravings. We become familiar with the strategies and beliefs we use to fortify our cocoon.

Our personal demons come in many guises. We experience them as shame, as jealousy, as abandonment, as rage. They are anything that makes us so uncomfortable that we continually run away.

Everything in your life - every moment, every struggle - is the path. Everything is an opportunity for awakening.

you'll eventually come to feel like you're in a battle with reality and reality is always winning.

The trick then is to practice gentleness and letting go. We can learn to meet whatever arises with curiosity and not make it such a big deal. Instead of struggling against the force of confusion, we could meet it and relax.

Taking refuge in the three jewels is no refuge at all from the conventional point of view. It's like finding a desert island in the middle of the ocean after a shipwreck—"Whew! Land!"—and then standing there and watching it being eaten away, day by day, by the ocean. That's what taking refuge in the buddha, the dharma, and the sangha is like.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that.

It has been said, quite accurately, that a psychotic person is drowning in the very same things that a mystic swims in.

Most of us do not take these situations as teachings. We automatically hate them. We run like crazy. We use all kinds of ways to escape—all addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can't stand it. We feel we have to soften it, pad it with something, and we become addicted to whatever it is that seems to ease the pain.

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

Hell is just resistance to life.

You're the only one who knows when you're using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you're opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is - working with it rather than struggling against it. You're the only one who knows.

Not to succeed in one thing is to fail in all.' Far more frightening than any poltergeist is the spectre of loneliness in old age.

Her view of the world was that it divided into 'exterminators' and 'exterminatees'. She would say: 'I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost.' She was a humorous writer with a tragic sense of life.

Let's say that matters hadn't gone quite right with you, I mean personal matters, would you be able to find words to say exactly what was wrong?' 'I'm afraid so, yes, I would.' 'That might be useful, of course.' 'Like manufacturers' instructions. In case of failure, try words.

se había engañado a sí misma al dejarse convencer, por un momento, de que los seres humanos no se dividen en exterminadores y exterminados, y que los exterminadores tienden a colocarse en la situación dominante en cuanto pueden. La fuerza de voluntad es inútil si no se va a algún lado.

Florence tenía buen corazón, aunque eso sirve de bien poco cuando de lo que se trata es de sobrevivir.