By Mark Matousek — 2016
How can suffering lead to wholeness? The beloved poet-philosopher explains.
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CLEAR ALL
We can temporarily push our ego away or try to rearrange our personality to be happier, freer, or more realized. But ego comes back. And that’s where Diamond Approach inquiry comes in. We all have awareness and inquiry helps us harness awareness to dissolve ego instead of pushing it away.
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As human beings, our predominant agenda is to survive. The instinct is deep in our DNA. Of course we want to stay alive, but now this instinct has become more of an emotional response. It's less about a threat to our actual existence and more about the barrage of perceived threats to our ego.
By acknowledging and honoring any feeling—no matter how “unacceptable” we might have previously judged it to be—we create space for its opposite.
Emotional Intelligence measures our ability to perceive our own emotions, as well as the emotions of others, and to manage them in a productive and healthy way.
As long as we have bodies, we will have physical pain. Buddhism promises no escape from that. What we can change is how we experience pain.