Encountering your worst fear, a situation that means the end of you, so it seems, sink into it.  Don’t try to fix it.  Breath it in.

A boulder of pain is threatening to crush you, but the boulder is a reflection of your own resistance.  Breath it in, and it disappears.

Not only does the boulder disappear, but what enters in its place is wonderous.  Light and ecstasy, the sweet taste of something otherworldy.  Love.  So, there is something more.  Not just a gap or a void.  Something.

Breath in your situation just as it is.  But don’t breath it in to make it go away.  Not that tense, tight breathing in, waiting with each inhalation for the situation to resolve itself.  Breath it in as though the situation will never change.  As though you will never change.

But you will.  You will sink into it and become it.  Like a woman who falls into the ocean and becomes a mermaid.  The water enters her lungs and creates gills, but not until she takes it in completely, fearlessly, with total acceptance.

The situations that get the best of me?  Being a source of pain and injury, being hated, fatally flawed, heavy, too broken for love, failing to make a worthwhile contribution to the world.  Spiritual failure.  Unenlightenment.

I breath in “unenlightenment,” and it dissolves into lucid bliss.  I breath in imperfection, and the frayed threads that are my flaws weave themselves into this communal dream, creating wholeness and perfection.  Perfectly imperfect.  I breath in being hated, being excluded, being a source of pain, like an actress throwing herself into the part.  Inhaling it to the fullest.  And it dissolves into love and oneness.

Reality is full of paradoxes.

The actual essence, pristine gnosis,
cannot be improved upon, so virtue is profitless,
and it cannot be impaired, so vice is harmless;
in its absence of karma there is no ripening of pleasure or pain;
in its absence of judgment, no preference for samsara or nirvana;
in its absence of articulation, it has no dimension;
in its absence of past and future, rebirth is an empty notion:
who is there to transmigrate? and how to wander?
what is karma and how can it mature?
Contemplate the reality that is like the clear sky!

~ Longchenpa in Old Man Basking in the Sun