CRYING

Everyone is suffering. You may have heard this before and so hopefully by now you have some idea that this is true.

This is important.

It’s a more or less permanent state in this human world.

If you read about persons attempting to use meditation as a pathway to enlightenment, meaning as a fully engrossing practice, they are sitting in meditation at least 6 or 8 hours a day and you will likely find that many or them if not all of them regularly fell apart crying in exhaustion or frustration from their efforts. You will also find musicians seeking to become masters that require 10,000 hours of practice regularly confronting the limitations of their concentrative abilities and folding in on themselves occasionally in sobbing heaps because they just can’t do it any more, only to find themselves waking up the next morning to be the first one in a practice room.

So we know that people dedicated, working long hours at something they believe in, do find frustration working at something that forces them to confront limitations or obstructions within themselves.

Many people would find the meditator or musician or other examples of this type of behavior excessive or extreme or even workaholic but the truth is it depends on what the practitioner is aimed at.

If you are seeking prestige, glamor, money, power, fame you will find that the bucket of desire for these things is bottomless and that you will never get your fill and eventually wind up in exhaustion with nothing but an empty desire for more.

However, if you are aiming in your practice and your work to better understand yourself and to deepen your insight into yourself so that you may better help others and serve them in a way that might help them to overcome some or all of their suffering, then I would say that your work is noble and aimed at the right things, and if, occasionally, you fall apart crying because it is damned difficult and painful or you feel occasionally that you are missing some things and that because of all that, you have some shred of insight that helps you adjust or re-aim your practice a little, then that crying is normal and fine and good and you should accept the crying or frustration as just part of the difficulties of the path you have set before yourself and that you should go forward on that path with the best of intentions, energy and purpose.

From my book, Hang in There Baby