[radical-revolution]

Each moment offers you a brand new opportunity to begin again with a soft heart and a steady breath. Trust in your ability to grow, stay patient with your progress, and always treat yourself with the same profound compassion you would offer to a dear friend.

[radical-revolution]

"The fact that it hurts and you feel sad—think of that as growth. That is what growth feels like."

– Pema Chödrön

…discomfort is often the actual mechanism of personal evolution.

When we transition through major life shifts, break old habits, or process grief, our minds tend to signal that something is fundamentally wrong. Chödrön invites a perspective shift, reframing the raw ache of sadness not as a failure or a roadblock, but as the literal sensation of your capacity expanding.

Core Insights

The Sensation of Stretching: Just as physical muscles tear slightly to grow stronger, your emotional baseline stretches when confronting hard truths, loss, or vulnerability.

Befriending the Discomfort: Instead of trying to instantly cure or distract yourself from sadness, this teaching encourages leaning into the felt experience without judgment.

The Dissolution of the Old Self: True growth requires shedding old patterns, certainties, and defenses. That shedding feels like a loss, which naturally triggers grief.

Pain vs. Suffering: In Buddhist philosophy, clean pain is an inevitable part of being alive. Suffering is what happens when we fight that pain or tell ourselves a story about why it shouldn't be there. This quote points to accepting raw, clean pain as a fertile ground for wisdom.

How to Apply This Daily

Pause and Name It: When an intense wave of sadness or vulnerability hits, notice the urge to run away, scroll on your phone, or fix it right away.

Shift Your Internal Narrative: Softly remind yourself: "Nothing is broken here. This is just what it feels like to expand past my old boundaries."

Locate the Feeling Physically: Drop out of the analytical story in your head and focus on the physical sensation in your body—whether it is a tightness in your chest or a heavy throat. Breathe into it without trying to force it to change.

…

[poboh]

The Dryad-Margaret Cones, 1931-1932, Nancy Ford Cones. American (1868 – 1962) - Black multiple gum print -

[thirdity]

“We must think of the media as if they were, in outer orbit, a sort of genetic code which controls the mutation of the real into the hyperreal.”

— Jean Baudrillard, Simulations

[radical-revolution]

[xphaiea]

Rosaleen Norton

[philosophybits]

“When we are hoping for rescue, a voice tells us that hope is in vain, yet it is powerless hope alone that allows us to draw a single breath. All contemplation can do no more than patiently trace the ambiguity of melancholy in ever new configurations. Truth is inseparable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.”

— Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 78

[lifeticket2003]

my giving trees

[sundipitous]

Don't you think this world is so lonely, and dying.

[shisasan]

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra originally published 1873

[sacred-portal]

[funeral]

Faced with today's technological revolution, one can understand Heiddeger's concern that postmodern humanity is being reduced to flexible standing reserve, without enduring essence or identity. As a standing reserve, human behavior would become totally coordinated with whatever technological devices happen to be available in a given situation. In other words, instead of using this or that device in accordance with a plan developed by oneself as an autonomous subject, the post-subject human would almost immediately begin engaging in whatever (more or less) skillful practice is elicited and required by the technological device that presents itself. Humans as self-conscious agents would virtually vanish into an ever more tightly coupled relationship with the electronic technology involved in the planetary-wide process of production and consumption.

Michael E. Zimmerman, "The End of Authentic Selfhood in the Postmodern Age?” in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Vol. 1 (2001)

[wetheurban]

I started noticing who I had to shrink around, and that told me everything.

[radical-revolution]

Most people stop when things get uncomfortable, repetitive, or complicated. To keep going—to reach the "very end"—requires a kind of devotion that strips away pretension. It’s the difference between browsing a subject and inhabiting it.

In that sense, seriousness is actually a form of honesty. You aren't satisfied with the surface-level version of a truth; you want the whole thing, regardless of where it leads.

[quotespile]

“My pray-without-ceasing experiment had all but proven the impossibility of controlling my thoughts. I could control one layer, the most readily available layer, but there was always a sublayer lurking. That sublayer was truer, more immediate, more essential, than anything else. It spoke softly but constantly, and the things it said were the very things that allowed me to live and to be. Now I understand that I have a subconscious life, vibrant and vital, that acts in spite of “ourselves,” our conscious selves.”

— Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

[theoptia]

C.G. Jung, from The Red Book: Liber Novus

[theoptia]

Anaïs Nin, from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934