If the Buddha Dated
Your journey is to know yourself
You are unique in all the world. Your journey is to know yourself.
To be loyal to your journey is to care for yourself and remember that at your center, you are luminous essence capable of compassion and love.
According to Stephen Wolinsky in The Tao of Chaos, we all start life as an essential being—completely spontaneous and free, without memories or associations.
The spiritual path is a process of unmasking ourselves rather than changing or repairing ourselves. We start by being aware of our masks, curious about their purpose, amused by their cleverness, yet always remembering that masks are simply that.
Notice the stories you tell yourself
We experienced a troublesome event, had an emotional response, and then we created a story to explain it or alleviate our pain. Over time, we repeated the story until it took on a life of its own and started to become a script we followed.
If we have the belief “I’ll always be abandoned,” we create situations where we’ll be abandoned, and forget to notice when people are loyal friends. Our task on the spiritual path is to stop repeating the same old stories and become aware of all the ways we keep proving our stories are true.
Your false core belief as a tremendous effect on how you react to situations and whom you are attracted to for friends and lovers.
One of our biggest stories is that our pain is serious. YES, PAST EVENTS AFFECTED US AND YES, WE’VE HAD TO FACE TOUGH THINGS IN LIFE, BUT THE TRAUMA IS OVER NOW. We free ourselves by bringing awareness to the moment and experiencing life in the present, unbounded by memories from the past.
So, when you think of running an ad in the personals, having a first date, feeling sexual attraction, or being loved, first notice the stories that come to mind. One helpful TECHNIQUE common to Buddhist practice is that when we get absorbed with our thinking, we simply say “thinking” and bring our attention to our breath as it goes in and out.
Underneath our stories we often find painful memories.
The KEY to allowing the memories into our heart is COMPASSION. We can remember that we were hurt or alone, and did the best we could to comfort ourselves. We can say to that part of ourselves, I understand why you felt that way, but IT’S OVER NOW, we’re grown up, we can take care of ourselves.
Complement If the Buddha Dated with The Mastery of Love.
