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Via Daily Dharma: Integrate Meditation into Every Moment

No matter what we encounter, whether it is possible for us to practice formally or not, we can still put ourselves in touch with that sense of simplicity and attentiveness, the basic presence that formal meditation cultivates—and project that out.

—Judy Lief, “On the Contagious Power of Presence”

Via Daily Dharma: Be Consistent, Not Insistent

To keep your practice consistent, remember what the famous Nike ad says: “Just do it.” Don’t concern yourself with trying to get to some particular place or state of mind. Each day’s zazen will be a little different, just like the rest of life.

—Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, “An Introduction to Zen”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - March 28, 2018

Compassionate action is a path on which we grow in awareness and insight. As we grow, we become purer instruments for change. We become hollow reeds for the healing music of life. 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: You Must Walk the Path Yourself

It is essential at the beginning of practice to acknowledge that the path is personal and intimate. It is no good to examine it from a distance as if it were someone else’s. You must walk it for yourself.

—Robert Aitken, “The Teacher in Everything”

Via Daily Dharma: Do Not Avoid, Do Not Desire

In birth there is nothing but birth and in death there is nothing but death. Accordingly, when birth comes, face and actualize birth, and when death comes, face and actualize death. Do not avoid them or desire them.

—Eihei Dogen Zenji, “Birth and Death”

Via Daily Dharma: Dharma Works. Do You?

If you are willing to do whatever it takes to find your way out of suffering—and it means confronting the roots of resistance and craving right here, right now—you can reach complete success.

—Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, “Getting Started”

Via Daily Dharma: What Sound Meditation Can Teach Us

Sounds, like everything else, arise and pass away. Just by listening, you can experience the insight of impermanence.

—Sylvia Boorstein, “Sound Meditation”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - March 25, 2018

You and I are in training to be conscious, to be conscious and compassionate in the truest, deepest sense—not romantically compassionate, but deeply compassionate. To be able to be an instrument of equanimity, an instrument of joy, an instrument of presence, an instrument of love, an instrument of availability, and at the same moment, absolutely quiet.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Creating New Habits

Sitting practices that focus on relaxing the underlying tensions and holdings you feel in your body, as well as restrictions to the breath, help you mitigate the legacy and habit patterns of reacting, clinging, and aversion.

—Will Johnson, “Full Body, Empty Mind”

Via Daily Dharma: Compassion Starts Close to Home

Thinking of yourself first, when your goal is to help others, might seem counterintuitive, but in fact it is the only way it can work.

—Cyndi Lee, “May I Be Happy”

Via Daily Dharma: Stick with It

This is why we practice meditation—so that we can treat ourselves more compassionately; improve our relationships with friends, family, and community; live lives of greater connection; and, even in the face of challenges, stay in touch with what we really care about so we can act in ways that are consistent with our values.

—Sharon Salzberg, “Sticking with It”

Via Daily Dharma: Know Your Mind, Live Your Life

If you want to be happy, you have to check the way you lead your life. Your mind is your religion.

—Lama Thupten Yeshe, “Your Mind Is Your Religion”

Via Ram Dass

The final awakening is the embracing of the darkness into the light. That means embracing our humanity as well as our divinity. What we go from is being born into our humanity, sleepwalking for a long time, until we awaken and start to taste our divinity and then want to finally get free.

We see as long as we grab at our divinity and push away our humanity we aren’t free. If you want to be free, you can’t push away anything. You have to embrace it all. It’s all God.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: What’s at the Root of Happiness?

It takes some training to equate complete letting go with comfort. But in fact, “nothing to hold on to” is the root of happiness. There’s a sense of freedom when we accept that we’re not in control.

—Pema Chödrön, “The In-between State”

Via Daily Dharma: A Practitioner’s Basic Question

The basic problem is one of self-knowledge: do we really understand what motivates us?

—David Loy, “The Nonduality of Good and Evil”

Via Daily Dharma: We All Need External Support

Before meditating, we pay homage to what’s traditionally known as the three jewels [the Buddha, dharma, and sangha], which buttress our practice . . . We aren’t meant to go at it alone.

—Elizabeth Zach, “Health Care for All Beings”

Via Daily Dharma: Allow Space for Serenity

Many of us try to do so many things at once that there is no space for serenity. We wonder why we are unhappy, why we feel alienated. We just need to remember to practice relaxing into our life, in all its joys and sorrows, and to relinquish the need to know what’s going to happen next.

—Michele McDonald, “Finding Patience”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - March 18, 2018

  If I am in my soul, when I look at others, I see their souls. I still see the individual differences – men and women, rich and poor, attractive and unattractive, and all that stuff. But when we recognize each other as souls, we are seeing each other as aspects of the One. Love is the emotion of merging, of becoming One. Love is a way of pushing through into the One.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: You Are Not Your Thoughts

Simply see the natural phenomena of physical and mental events as they arise and pass away. They’re not you. They’re not really yours. You don’t have any real control over them.

—Upasika Kee Nanayon, “Tough Teachings to Ease the Mind”

Via Daily Dharma: Breathing Is an Anchor to Awareness

The breath changes and you change. Nothing stays the same, yet there is constancy. The breath reminds us that we are here and alive: let it be your anchor to the present moment.

—Elana Rosenbaum, “Guided Meditation: Awareness of Breathing”

Via Daily Dharma: Embodied Enlightenment

In its most ancient Buddhist form, meditation is a technique for letting go of the objectifying tendency of thought and of entering deeply and fully into communion with our embodied experience. And hence it leads to “touching enlightenment with the body.”

—Reggie Ray, “Touching Enlightenment”

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Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - March 14, 2018

After one progresses in his or her sadhana, after meditation gets deeper, he or she lets go of the model of themselves more and more, and begins to touch and enter deeper into that space of love. One begins to experience love toward more and more people.

Sooner or later you are going to be in love with just the universe. You’ll be sitting in that place that is love where all is One. Then when you look at another being, you are looking at love. You are love, you are with love. You are then in the state of love with all beings. At this point you’ve given up all the stuff that’s going to pull you out of this place. At this point, all of the fear in a love relationship is dissipated.

- Ram Dass -

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Via Daily Dharma: Listen Closely

A useful technique for developing inner silence is recognizing the space between thoughts. Attend closely with sharp mindfulness when one thought ends and before another begins—there! That is silent awareness!

—Ajahn Brahm, “Stepping towards Enlightenment”

Via Daily Dharma: The Paradox of Practice

The weird thing is that the only way one really gets any of the most important benefits of meditation practice is by giving up on the notion that there are any benefits to meditation practice.

—Brad Warner, “Goalless Practice”

Via Daily Dharma: Wise Mindfulness

In the Buddhist path to nibbana, mindfulness is not about becoming a happier, better person. It’s not about “happiness” at all—at least not if “happiness” is understood as the fulfillment of desire. Mindfulness is, rather, about wisdom rooted in insight, renunciation, and unqualified self-surrender.

—C.W. Huntington, Jr., “Are You Looking to Buddhism When You Should Be Looking to Therapy?”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - March 11, 2018

Our human forms are composed of and surrounded by an infinite myriad of forms, all in constant motion, from the subatomic to the cosmic in scale. This is the lila, the enchanted dance of existence, the divine interplay of consciousness and energy. Amid this divine play we seek fulfillment, perfection, flow, freedom, enlightenment, Oneness.

The dominant quality of form is change, because all forms are in time. That’s another way of saying we don’t know what will happen from one instant to the next. Or, as one of my guru brothers are fond of saying, “Don’t be surprised to be surprised!” For instance, I didn’t anticipate I’d be living in a wheelchair today. The way to live with change is to be completely present in the moment (remember, Be Here Now).

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Find Your Refuge

A spiritual practice can be an island, a place where opening to uncertainty and doubt can lead us to a refuge of truth.

—Joan Halifax, “The Lucky Dark”

Via Daily Dharma: Relax and Let Be

When the thinking mind takes a break for even a few seconds, a kind of relaxed awareness replaces the usual stream of thoughts. We need to encourage this and not fill this space with anything else; just let it be.

—Tsultrim Allione, “Feeding Your Demons”

Via Daily Dharma: Embrace Impermanence with Mindfulness

When the winds of change reach hurricane force, our inner refuge of mindfulness, concentration, and discernment is the only thing that will keep us from getting blown away.

—Thanissaro Bhikkhu, “What We’ve Been Practicing For”

Via Daily Dharma: Creating Your Karma

With your reaction to each experience, you create the karma that will color your future. It is up to you whether this new karma is positive or negative. You simply have to pay attention at the right moment.

—Trungram Gyalwa Rinpoche, “The Power of the Third Moment”

Olympic Ice Skater Adam Rippon on Being a Hero for LGBTQ Youth

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - March 7, 2018

Over the years we develop strong habits of perceiving the universe, and we come to be very secure within these habits. We selectively perceive our environment in ways that reinforce them. This collection of habits is what we call ego. But meditation breaks the ego down. As we begin to see through it we can become confused as to what reality is. What once seemed absolute now begins to seem relative.

When this happens, some people get confused; others fear they may be going insane. The best strategy for dealing with this disorientation is to note it and let it be. The path to freedom is through detachment from your old habits of ego.

Slowly you will arrive at a new and more profound integration of your experience in a more evolved structure of the universe. That is, you will flow beyond the boundaries of your ego until ultimately you merge into the universe. Until then you must break through old structures, develop broader structures, break through those, and develop still broader structures.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Independence Is No Longer an Option

In an increasingly interconnected and transparent world, no form of Buddhism can afford to be an island.

—Stephen Batchelor, “Lessons of History”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - March 4, 2018

People often say to me, “I would really like to do sadhana, but…I’m a teacher now. If I could only finish being a teacher, I could do sadhana.”

BALONEY! You’re either doing sadhana or you’re not. Sadhana is a full time thing that you do because there is nothing else to do. You do it whether you’re teaching, or sitting in a monastery…whether you’re lying in bed, going to the toilet, making love, eating…EVERYTHING is part of waking up. Everything is done without attachment. Another way of saying it is: It’s all done as consecrated action….it’s all dedicated…it’s all sacred.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: The Mind Can, Should, and Must Be Fixed

From a Buddhist perspective, even if all material problems could be solved, suffering would remain. The world is unfixable, said Buddha. Happiness depends, ultimately, only on the mind; it is the mind that can, should, and must be fixed.

—Linda Heuman, “Who’s Got Good News?”

Via 12 of 22 Daily Dharma: Right Concentration

Concentration is “right” when it demonstrates the feasibility of training the mind, when it supports the investigation of impermanence, when it erodes selfish preoccupation, and when it reveals the benefits of surrender. It is not “right” when it is seen as an end in itself and when it is used to avoid painful truths.

—Mark Epstein, “Meditation’s Secret Ingredient”

Via Daily Dharma: Diligence Begets Discovery

All the qualities that the great masters found, we can attain as well. It all depends on our own efforts, our diligence, our deeper knowing, and our correct motivation.

—Ogyen Trinley Dorje, “Calm Abiding”

Via Daily Dharma: Anything but Static

The more I sit, the more I simply see things. I see that life, my life, is an ongoing process.

—Connie Hillard, “Making Time”

Via Daily Dharma: Accepting Groundlessness

Our lives are gradual paths of groundlessness. When we can accept that people and things are always shifting and changing, our hearts can open.

—Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, “The Hunger for Home”

Via Daily Dharma: Live Life in Full

Death is all around us, everywhere. For the most part—following the lead of our culture—we avoid it. But if we do open our hearts to this fact of our lives, it can be a great help to us. It can teach us how to live.

—Larry Rosenberg, “Only the Practice of Dharma Can Help Us at the Time of Death”