reincarnation

As a metaphor for personal growth

From Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart:

What we find as practitioners is that nothing ever really goes away until it has taught us what it is we need to know… it just keeps returning with new names, forms, and manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach is about where we are separating ourselves from reality.

Reincarnation seems like a metaphor for this: you keep going around the wheel of life until you figure out being a snail and get reincarnated as a mouse. I don’t believe in reincarnation literally, but it reminds me of how I keep following these same patterns of behavior—e.g. not following doctors’ orders to stretch and exercise my back and continually getting injured—until something clicks and I’m able to move beyond the eddy I’m stuck in. And the bit about “separating ourselves from reality” is key. Reality is what it is. We’re not likely to get far denying reality, even though I do it often (magical thinking that I don’t need to stretch and exercise, because I’d rather do other things). And reality has a way of reminding us it’s still there when we deny it. Only by accepting reality (and even if we hope to change it, acceptance of it is a precondition) can we move forward and work with it.