President’s Message

Greetings!

This month I like to talk about patience. I will be quoting from Pema Chodron book, Comfortable with Uncertainty for some of this message. “The power of patience is that it is the antidote to anger, a way to learn to love and care for whatever we meet on the path. By patience we do not mean enduring , grin and bear it. In any situation, instead of reacting suddenly, we could chew it ,smell it, look at it and open ourselves to seeing what’s there. The opposite of patience is aggression ,the desire to jump and move ,to push against our lives, to try to fill up space. The journey of patience involves relaxing, opening to what’s happening, experiencing a sense of wonder.”

“One of the ways to practice patience is to practice give and take meditation. When want to make a sudden move. When we start to speed though life, when we feel we must have resolution, we someone yells we feel insulted, we want to yell back and get even. We want to put out our poison. Instead we can connect with basic human restlessness, basic human aggression, by practicing tonglen (give and take) for all beings. Then we can send out a sense of space, which further shows things down. Sitting, standing there, we can allow the space for the usual habitual things not to happen. Our words and actions might be quite different because we allowed ourselves time to touch and taste and see the situation first.”

Thanks for all you do,
Rob