Writing on the Subject of:

On the barriers we create to hide from our fears including our mortal fear.

Without realizing it we continually shield ourselves from this pain because it scares us. We put protective walls made of opinions, prejudices, and refugees, barriers that are built on a deep fear of being hurt. These walls are further fortified by emotions all kinds: anger, craving, indifference, jealousy and envy, arrogance and price. But fortunately for us, this soft spot -- our innate ability to love and to care about things -- is like a crack in these walls we erect. It's a natural opening in the barriers we create when we are afraid. With practice we can learn to find this opening. We can learn to seize vulnerable moment -- love, gratitude, loneliness, embarrassment, inadequacy ….

On going through our fears including mortal fear:

Openness does this come from resisting our fears but from getting to know them well. Rather than getting rather than going after those walls and barriers was a sledgehammer, we pay attention to them. With gentleness and honesty, we move closer to those walls. We touch them and smell them and get to know them well. We began a process of acknowledging our own versions and our cravings. We become familiar the strategies and believes we use to build a walls: What are the stories I tell myself? What repels me and what attracts me? We start to get curious about what's going on. Without calling what we see you right or wrong, we simply look as objectively as we can. We can observe ourselves with humor, not getting overly serious, moralistic, or uptight about this investigation. Year after year, we train in the remaining open and receptive to what ever arises.

On accepting that life is always in change and that we have to ease into accepting constant transition.

We know that all is an permanent; we know that everything wears out. Although we can buy this truth intellectually, emotionally we have a rooted aversion to it. We want permanent; we expect a permanence. Our natural tendency is to seek security; we believe we can find it. We experience permanence at everyday level as frustration. We use our daily activity as a shield against the fundamental ambiguity of our situation, expanding tremendous energy to pour off the impermanence and death. We don't like it that our bodies change shape. We don't like it that we age. We are afraid of wrinkles and sagging skin. We use health products as if we actually believe that our skin, our hair, our eyes and teeth, might somehow miraculously escape the truth of impermanence. The Buddhist teachings aspire to set us free from this limited away a relating. They encourage us to relax gradually and wholeheartedly into the ordinary and obvious truth of change. Acknowledging this to doesn't mean that were looking on the dark side. What it means is that we begin to understand that we're not the only one who can't keep it all together. We no longer believe that there are people who have managed to avoid uncertainty.

On our wish to  resist change and hold on to permanence:

We suffer when we resist the noble and irrefutable truth of impermanence and death. We suffer, not because we are basically bad or deserved to be punished, but because of three tragic misunderstandings. First, we expect that what is always changing should be graspable and predictable. We are born with a craving for resolution and security that governs our thoughts, words, and actions. We are like people in a boat that is falling apart, trying to hold on to the water. The dynamic, energetic, and natural flow of the universe is not acceptable to conventional mind. Our prejudices and addictions are patterns that arise from the fear of a fluid world. Because we mistakenly take one is always changing to be permanent, we suffer.