PAGE IN PROGRESS What you see here is a page of my hypertext book POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power. Initially empty, this page will slowly be filled with thoughts, notes, and quotes. One day, I will use them to write a coherent entry, similar to these completed pages. See this post to better understand my creative process. Thank you for your interest and patience!
Buddhism is about understanding that we don't have power over circumstances, but we can find power if we choose how to react to circumstances.
In the Buddhist roots of mindfulness, this wisdom is a bit part of waking up: seeing directly, in your meditation and your experience, that life is not reliable. Everything is impermanent, and like your favorite software license, it is subject to change at any moment. Death is inescapable, and often shows up sooner than you expect. People have capacities for both love and cruelty, wisdom and stupidity. This is how life is.
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If you see this enough times, over and over again, gradually the brain rewires itself, and you don’t invest in quite the same way. You still go out dancing, make love, march in a protest, get your kid to school, visit your sick relative, or stay home and Netflix & chill—but you do so in a somewhat lighter way. This lightness – this not holding on so tightly, this endless, every-minute process of letting go—is a bit hard to describe, but it’s the experience of millions of people who have built a meditation practice over a long period of time. One word for it, I kid you not, is nirvana.
BOOK: "The wisdom of no escape" https://pemachodronfoundation.org/product/the-wisdom-of-no-escape-book/