So Here It Is
If a company can be successful and call itself Oops perhaps you too can be successful with your oops.
Oops Company - Hokkaido Japan
By this I mean, they deal with theory and maybe not so much nuts and bolts of real life. I don’t know, what do you think?
So here it is, late at night, I am tired from a long day at the hospital at the conclusion of which I rushed over to an outpatient recovery group where I lead an hour long meditation. I didn’t write today’s meditation in advance and now I need to get it done tonight before I can rest peacefully, without feeling that somehow I let you down, or that I failed to meet my goal.
How many times do you find yourself in similar circumstances? Your home from work, dead tired, so many things to do, and how to you still be Buddhist?
I think sometimes we need to learn to be generous with ourselves. As I tell the folks at the outpatient recovery group, be gentle with yourself. There are enough folks out there who will all to quickly put you down, or deride your efforts, or make light of your struggle, and we hear those messages all day, every day. We are bombarded by messages that we are somehow inferior or deficient, or something is wrong with us.
Let it go, for a night. Be honest with yourself. You did a good job, maybe not everything you set out to do, but what you did you did well. Celebrate with that and let the other stuff go. Be kind to yourself. Instead of looking at all the ways it could have been different, realize that it wasn’t different, and be at peace with your effort.
Maybe you could have done better or differently but it didn’t happen that way, it happened another way. Who knows maybe in the long run what you did was the perfect thing.
We all have our limits, we all have our different capabilities, different capacities. But all of us can and do receive the Dharma equally, not based upon how much we achieve, but on how fully we manifest our true self; a self not determined by accomplishments or lack there of. Continue, day by day, to strive to be the best you can possibly be, and don’t let that be decided by external measures but by your internal feelings of peace, joy and contentment.
“Although my teachings are of the same content to anyone just as the rain is of the same taste, the hearers receive my teachings differently according to their capacities just as the plants receive different amounts of the rain water.” (Lotus Sutra, Chapter V)
