Wednesday, September 02, 2009

Monsters

This little guy is the first in a series called, "monsters: how we shield our genuine, tender hearts". The inspiration for this series came from the writings of Pema Chodron, these two passages in particular: "Rather than original sin, there's original soft spot. The messy stuff that we see in ourselves and that we perceive in the world as violence and cruelty and fear is not the result of some basic badness but of the fact that we have such a tender, vulnerable, warm heart of bodhichitta, which we instinctively protect so that nothing will touch it." "... this is a practice where compassion begins to arise in you because you yourself have been there. You've been angry, jealous and lonely. You know what it's like and you know how sometimes you do strange things. Because you're lonely, you say cruel words: because you want someone to love you, you insult them." To me, recognizing these things about ourselves and others is the basis for relating to each other with compassionate understanding. This is so important! All of us are monsters: sometimes just annoying, sometimes horrific, but always with great big tender hearts inside.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do I like this? Yes, because it's so rockin'!

Love ya,

- mortar and bestle

matirose said...

your comment just made me laugh.. out loud. thank you. xo mati

Laurie Walters said...

Meant to tell you this when I looked at it a few days ago... I absolutely LOVE this! I've been showing it to everyone... Totally awesome. :) Love ya~