cultivating life with a sense of presence and equanimity

Simply having a multitude of experiences and the opinions that surround them has no real authenticity in human relationships. It is when we absorb them in our self-observation and then laboriously trace them back on our own to their origin and source that we discover the experiental patterns that their mental states create, in which we also rediscover the absolute human foundation of stillness and calm that we have within us. But not by suppressing them because then we can neither follow how we have applied them, do it now, nor evaluate them. We can then stop personalizing everything that happens that makes us capricious and restless because we no longer have to resist an abundance of impulses and impressions and constantly meet them with objections and aversion. We can simply begin to acknowledge them for what they are in and of themselves as they arise or come to us even though the experiences we encounter of these patterns and mental states have arisen in the relationships that people around us have with these same sources within them. But as long as we personalize them, we will be the cause of and inflict on ourselves and others all sorts of psychological and social suffering.