What to do when we’re Frustrated.
When you’re tired. When you’re frustrated. When your head and neck ache. When folks don’t help you, they don’t show up, they don’t meet you halfway.
Smile. Grin. Pinch yourself. Take a deep breath, of course—only we don’t, when we feel claustrophobic and frustrated.
Refuse to take yourself seriously. Make fun of yourself. Be kind to yourself, though. Take a bath.
We are all struggling. Reach out. Be kind. Mean it.
Walk the Talk Show with Waylon Lewis presents:
Wars are started because We can’t find Peace within Ourselves.
As Trungpa Rinpoche put it, “A great deal of the chaos in the world occurs because people don’t appreciate themselves.”
Maitri might be my favorite word. It means loving-kindness, for oneself and others. It’s the feeling of ache, of need, of insecurity…relaxing. It’s a full fresh breath of air through fear. It’s making peace with loneliness, or one’s body, or one’s balding, or one’s acne, or one’s shortcomings, perceived and otherwise.
It’s not a one-time achievement—it’s an ongoing practice. We have to work at it. We have to play at it. We have to want to make friends with ourselves.
The tool is meditation. But other tools help, too: exercise, a bath with your favorite magazine, eating real food while sitting down after cooking and cleaning.
If the world invested in maitri, in health, in joy, in compassion instead of in bombs…well, we wouldn’t need bombs.
Here’s my video on it, which I recorded just this afternoon in my backyard in Boulder, Colorado:
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Join Elephant’s self-paced course, Maitri: the Buddhist practice of Making Friends with Yourself. This course won’t make you better—it’ll help you make friends with yourself as you actually are.
Relephant:
Pema Chodron: This is the Most Important Thing.
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