Inner Worlds
“Each of us lives in many different worlds. There’s the world of work, the world of our family, and our inner worlds. These worlds inside are the ones we’re most responsible for, because no one else can take care of them. So we have to learn how to make them nourishing. If they’re starved, if all we can talk to ourselves about is how miserable we are, how impoverished we are, how much we’re in danger, it spills out to our other worlds as well,” American Buddhist monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu shares. “We’ve seen this with hummingbirds. On the days when the feeders are empty, they don’t come and attack the human beings who forgot to fill the feeders. They attack one another. ‘It’s your fault,’ they say, ‘that I’m hungry.’ That’s because they’ve forgotten the flowers and other places where they can go for their food. In the same way, we take things out on one another because we’ve forgotten where our real nourishment should lie: inside. … No one else can do this work for us.” Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s words from March 2020 remind us that the way we see the world around us is inextricably tied to the way we engage our inner worlds.
