Slogan #34

Don't transfer the ox's load to the cow.

I love this quote by Ruth King: “Life is not personal, permanent, or perfect.” Given these 3 essential truths, Slogan #34 advises us to take responsibility for our own burdens—“don’t pick up what isn't yours; don't avoid what is.” This slogan is practical and focused and can also be expressed as the following idioms: “the buck stops here” or “stay in your own lane.” Oxen are beasts of burden. Cows are not. So don’t unload your burdens to someone else who can ill afford the added weight. Furthermore, when you shift responsibility for your suffering to others you are abandoning the integral practice of learning to tolerate the consequences of being 100% yourself and in turn, your power to acknowledge, accept, and overcome your own suffering. Sutra 2.16 (“Heyam dukham anagatam”) so aptly states that since our suffering is self-created, we have the ability to consciously intervene and fully extinguish future causes of suffering.

Ruth King’s words can be rescripted into the following aspirations: “Life is potential, reality, and love” or letting go, letting be, and letting in. Build healthy, compassionate boundaries in order to develop appropriate uses of power. Place positive value on contingency and constraint. How can you best learn and unlearn? Meditation is not encouraging us to transcend our experience but to embody it.

“Learning to be kind to ourselves, learning how to respect ourselves is important. The reason it’s important is that fundamentally, when we look into our own hearts and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn’t just ourselves that we’re discovering, we’re discovering the universe”

Pema Chodron.