Great Throughts Treasury

"Relationships do not end when a person dies. Some other aspect of it deepens and begins. Your relationship isn't over, it is just no longer externalized. The pain involved is the consequence of love. That's what love costs."

"The way we respond to pain is the way we respond to life. When things aren't the way we want them to be, what do we do? Do we close down, or do we open up to get more of a sense of what's needed in the moment? Our conditioning is to close down -- aversion, rejection, put it away, denial. Nothing heals. That is the very basis on which unfinished business accumulates, putting it away -- I'm right, they're wrong; no quality of forgiveness. We know many people who are working on sending forgiveness into their tumors, into their AIDS, into their degenerative heart disease. It sounds so bizarre, because our conditioning is to send anger into it, fear into it. Where can there be healing in that?"

"The word surrender is so funny, because most people, particularly in the case of illness, equate surrender with defeat. But surrender is letting go of resistance. Most of what we call pain is the resistance that clenches down on the unpleasant. In fact, a really dynamic, practical sense of that is that a lot of the people we work with, if they're going to take medicine, they'll look at it. They won't just swallow it automatically. They're not trying to take healing from outside. They're not giving up control to healing. They're participating in it, they're taking responsibility for it -- responsibility being the ability to respond, instead of the necessity to react. They look at the pills, and as they take them in, they guide them with loving-kindness into the area, because they've put so much attention into the area they know the inside, the multiple molecular variation of sensation within, the moment-to-momentness of that area. They direct it into that area, and they find, for instance with pain medication, that once the resistance has been gone through, that they can decrease the medication. Because I think a lot of medications get used up by the resistance before they ever get to the place that they're being taken to."

"There is no place where forgiveness is inappropriate, although it may take time.ÿ"

"When the mind sinks into the heart, and vice versa, there's healing. When we become one with ourselves, there's healing."