Mindfulness Meditation (For Everyday Life)

their necklaces of skulls and grotesque grimaces.
Their terrible outward appearance is actually a
disguise adopted by deities embodying wisdom and
compassion to help us attain greater understanding
and kindness toward ourselves and toward others,
who, it is understood, are not fundamentally different
from ourselves.
In Buddhism, the vehicle for this work of inner
development is meditation. Even in the fairy tales, to
get in touch with the wild man under the pond
requires bucketing out the pond, something Bly points
out takes repetitive inner work over a long time.
There is nothing glamorous about bucketing out a
pond, or working at a hot forge, or in the sweltering
vineyards, day after day, year after year. But
repetitive inner work of this kind, coming to know the
forces of one's own psyche, is its own initiation. It is a
tempering process. Usually heat is involved. It takes
discipline to tolerate the heat, to persevere. But what
comes of keeping at it is mastery and non-naivete,
attainment of an inward order unattainable without
the discipline, the heat, the descent into our darkness
and fear. Even the interior defeats we suffer serve us
in this tempering.
This is what Jungians call soul work, the development
of depth of character through knowing something of