Starting With Who You Are (It is Not an Obstacle to Your Practice)
June 1, 2026 | 1 CommentAudio only version is here
Meditation practice begins at 10:31
Hello, wonderful Open Heart Project. I hope you are finding moments of ease where you can.
Before today’s sit, I continue the conversation I began a few weeks ago about how we view meditation in the Open Heart Project. The first point was that we engage in daily ritual. The second was that we live as mystics hiding in plain sight. And today, I want to talk about something many spiritual traditions regard as a problem: your personal hopes, fears, preferences, and feelings.
I see it differently. The personal is not an obstacle. It is the way.
Who you are, what hurts you, what delights you, what confuses you—these are not things to get rid of. They are where practice begins. When we are willing to feel what we feel with kindness and curiosity, our hearts naturally open toward others who feel the same things.
Please have a listen and let me know what you think.
With love,
Susan
categorized in: meditation, open heart project
1 Comment
I’ve always found the term emptiness very confusing as for me it conjures up a sense of coldness, even nihilism which is disturbing, So the term to me feels like it doesn’t translate well and I’ve heard many Buddhist teachers say that spaciousness is a better translation . Spaceousness definitely has a very different quality to it, and to me it somehow feels more expansive, abundant and uplifting. I find your definition of emptiness as “emptiness of all separation” really interesting and very welcome as it definitely offers greater clarification. In trying to understand or explore what that might mean as it’s a bit of a mind bender, I found myself spontaneously turning the definition 180 degrees round to ‘fullness of all non-separation”? And that really got me pondering whether that’s a useful direction to take or if it’s a misleading one , so I’d very much welcome your knowledge and wisdom on this.