Live Session Summary, Sunday, March 9, 2025: It was good to be with you for our live session today. The focus of the session was on three core practices to cultivate peace in these turbulent times.
Here are some of the main themes, poems, and quotes from today’s Live session:
The first core practice I highlighted to help us strengthen peace and resilience is the willingness to be with our experience as it is—the joys and sorrows; the pains and pleasures; the good, the bad, and the ugly—without clinging, resisting, or escaping.
When we train the mind to open to our experience, everything can come and go without being a problem. It might be a difficult emotion or sensation, but if it is met with kindness and acceptance, we can learn to tolerate challenging experiences and don’t have to add the ‘second arrow’ of suffering to the ‘first arrow’ of pain: As the saying goes, ‘pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.’
The Sufi poet Rumi invites us to ‘Welcome the guests //Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows.’ Dorothy Hunt reminds us that ‘Peace is this moment without judgment // This moment in the heart space where everything that is is welcome.’ And Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now counsels that ‘What you accept fully, you go beyond.’
Saying ‘yes’ to what is; cultivating radical, or deep-rooted, acceptance; meeting our experience open-heartedly without judgment or resistance, are all skillful ways of finding peace whatever the circumstances or conditions. Peace is always possible, always available, always already here. Turning towards what we are experiencing here and now is the gateway to peace and the deepest freedom.
The second core practice that I discussed is training the mind to untangle ourselves from stories and narratives that keep us locked in suffering—for example, when we identify with our fear or anger and get swept up in thought patterns that control us rather than being a product of our conscious choosing.
Once we become habituated to these forms of thinking it can be difficult to untangle ourselves because we identify the mental stories—about how things ‘are’ or how a person always is, how life is, or how we ourselves are. I shared the story of the person riding a horse that’s galloping along at top speed and someone shouts to the rider, ‘Where are you going?’ and the rider shouts back, ‘Don’t ask me, ask the horse.’
When the unconscious, unmindful mind is in the driver’s seat, we keep ourselves locked in suffering. It takes training and attention to notice when the mind is swept up in afflictive thinking and to choose to come out of the mental narrative and back to our direct experience. Over time, we can retrain the mind to be present and find peace here and now. In the words of Eckhart Tolle, ‘You can always cope with the present moment. but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection — you cannot cope with the future.’
The third core practice we explored to cultivate peace whatever the conditions is to practice self-compassion. Self-compassion consists of three key qualities: 1) meeting our experience with kindness rather than with harshness or judgment; 2) recognizing our ‘common humanity’ rather than identifying with the illusion that we are alone and separate from others and from life; and 3) mindfulness—meeting our experience with a balanced awareness rather than with clinging, aversion, or unconsciousness.
We can practice self-compassion by repeating phrases rooted in kindness and care: ‘May I be safe // May I be happy // May I be kind to myself // May I accept myself as I am.’ Cultivating self-compassion is associated with a wide variety of health benefits.
When we cultivate these three core practices we deepen peace and well-being, free ourselves from suffering, and open with compassion to the suffering of others.
I shared the poems ‘Wild Geese’ by Mary Oliver and ‘The Good News’ by Thich Nhat Hanh.
Have a good week ahead and I look forward to seeing you next Sunday, March 16 at 9am eastern. Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏻 💜 🌻
Below is a post attached to the daily Quote on insight timer on March 11:
How ironic is this quote on my special day, and Tanisha's comment about embracing the 'uncertain present'...this day really is a present for me, one that I am truly grateful for, because as I celebrate my 'existence', two other people I know are being laid to rest today.
So I hope that each and every one of you realizes that every morning when you are 'woken up', you have been gifted with another day, another chance to make the most of your time here. Life moves fast, and the only moment we truly have is right now. So enjoy it, appreciate it, and show love to those around you. Follow your heart, find joy in the little things, and live fully, because what really matters is not how long we live, but how we spend each moment. ❤🙏🌈💫
