“If you try to change difficult feelings then they are defining you. You therefore are confessing that you’re not already whole – you have to first defeat this negative feeling to be whole – and there’s no winning that one. The ego will so much enjoy trying to defeat some problem or some negative feeling in order to arrive at the promised land of wholeness that it will forever have you trying to solve your own suffering in order to keep itself in place, in order to keep itself intact.
So there is, in this present moment, the art of being in relationship to what you’re experiencing, gradually over time, not fighting against it. In Zen they talk about when you reach a barrier, when you reach an obstacle, you stop. You soften the belly, you sit down and slowly you touch the barrier until you can embrace it. Not go around the obstacle, not retreat from the obstacle, but embrace the obstacle. What’s the obstacle to my open heart?”
–Richard Moss, An Open Heart
Svaha 