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When you look on the world in friendship, friendship is what you receive. In order to move through life with ease, this understanding is needed. In whatever way the life you are living does not reflect your will or your preferences, it is nonetheless the right life for you. When you pit yourself against fate, feeling that you must take charge, you create an opposition with the flow that is uniquely yours. For many of you emotional discomfort triggers beliefs that you are in some way "wrong", either internally or externally, that you must take better charge and either change yourself or change your life. In fact, emotional discomfort is an inevitable outcome of the system within which you live. You are in a cauldron of change and polarity. The belief in happiness as a goal and an outcome is destructive. Choose instead truth. Choose instead integrity. Life is not about the gratification of appetites. It is the unfolding of a destiny.
When you are uncomfortable, embrace this too as part of life. Despair is only the refusal to accept the way things are unfolding. The experience of helplessness, once surrendered to, is ecstatic. It is only the ego that protests.
There are no circumstances in which the heart is forced to close. The closing of the heart is a choice, and one which is always destructive. Though it may look like protection it is more like self-annihilation. Though the ego plays hold-out, forgiveness and love are always the healers. Therefore, enter into pain as you enter into pleasure; with curiosity and a welcome. Make no distinction and you will find your life melting in love. There is no failure possible unless you hold it so. Open, and in opening you will find joy arising, even when what you are opening to is painful.
For the western mind, this looks miraculous. "How can I be happy when I am unhappy?" you will ask. The answer is that the conditional happiness to which you have learned to pay attention is only a superficial layer of your being. Beneath it, beneath the complex structure of beliefs and stories that comprise the ego, there exists a joy which is unconditional. This joy neither resists nor grasps that which arises. It is the essence of non-attachment as understood by the Buddha. To arrive at this unconditional place unravel the stories to which you cling. Let go of idealized versions of your life in some unreachable future and recognize that the full experience of life in human form embraces all extremes. This is as it should be. Give up self-blame, give up refusal, give up negative judgment, and the play reveals itself for what it is. This way, no matter your fate, you begin to rejoice in the unique expression of life that you are.
And if you cannot give them up, then recognize them for what they are; the spasms of the ego as it attempts to create the illusion of control. Include them also in the landscape of what is acceptable and life once again becomes kind.
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