Handshaking our Beautiful Monsters
I read an article by Tsoknyi Rinpoche on How to Make Friends with our Beautiful Monsters.
I had a feeling to share that experience. I found it aligned with what we offer at FRY.
We emphasize the relationship we need to have with the movement and the feelings that come from it.
Handshaking our Beautiful Monsters. Who are they?
Anger, fear, envy. You name it. Those are all feelings we experience in our life. Instead of fighting them make friends with them.
You want to better your life. So, you might decide to read some self-help books written by well-known authors. Some of you had the fortune to talk to some mentors. And it seems you get it up in your head. It seems you have a clearer vision of your life experiences. Yet, you are still stuck in the same emotional and energetic habit patterns.
That happens because there is no communication between mind, body, and feelings. Your understanding is not digested at the level of body and feeling. It is at the level of the intellectual mind. It is not deeply integrated.
We often feel ashamed of our emotional patterns. Those emotions make our lives and relationships difficult.
We resist and react to what we feel.
We hate what we feel.
We just want all our feelings to go away.
Practicing handshaking with our Beautiful Monsters
As suggested by Tsonknyi Rinpoche, we need to learn to look at them as “Beautiful Monsters”. If we think of them as just “Monsters”, we solidify our aversion toward them. If we think of them as just “Beautiful”, we are denying the destructive potential they have and the suffering they can cause.
It’s important to understand that they are both friends and enemies. It is like looking at your hand: it has two sides; it exists with two sides. You cannot consider the functionality of your hands by only considering one side. The bottom side of the hand exists because its top side exists.
Rinpoche describes our “Beautiful Monsters” like ice. Their nature is water. We don’t have to destroy the ice but melt it and free it and let it flow. Our “Beautiful Monsters” are like that. They are frozen patterns of reacting and resisting. To melt the ice and so our “friendly enemies”, we need to use the warmth of our kindness toward them, without any judgmental mind.
We have to learn to have a “handshake attitude” between our awareness and our feelings. Not running away from our feeling. Not fighting them. Just meeting them in full awareness.
Remind yourself to “allow the chin to dip down a little bit” when you feel defeated.
The old Taoist text “Tao Te Ching” talks about being the Valley of the Universe. It says: Know honour, yet keep humility! Be the valley of the universe! You don’t always have to strive to be the mountain, the highest point, the biggest thing around. Feel the power of what Gandhi described as “coming back to zero”: that selfless space where what becomes zero is the ego or the identity. And you begin to access that place beyond time, place and space. Going beyond every label that we’ve ever been given. Our name, our gender, our ethnicity, our nationality, job occupation.
All these labels are not the things that really define Who You Are.
Who you truly are is boundless, infinite, eternal, and incredibly sacred. And ego stands for Edging Goodness Out!
Sasy
