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This week we explore the wisdom of poet Rainer Maria Rilke & how Rilke's quote on 'Living the Questions' parallels Patanjali's wisdom in the Yoga Sutras. Rilke writes:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.

Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke

“To live the questions” is radical. Bc how many of us do this? We really don’t, right?

Living the questions means that we can swim and float in the waters of uncertainty. And be ok with it.

Uncertainty isn’t typically a very comfortable place to be — and most of us run from discomfort, into the open arms of distractions, addictions, easy or cheap answers and reassurances.

“To live the questions” is to learn to be comfortable in discomfort.

Rilke is asking us to soften our very human desire to have it figured it out, bc it’s totally futile — we know we can’t know it all. The ancient yogis understood this relationship with the mystery as well.