CHOIR sings OM SO HUM Mantra (Must Listen)

Very, very beautiful! 'Soham' means I am That'. 'That' means the very source of creation. If you bring some awareness into to your breath, become conscious of it, every inhalation makes the sound 'SO' and exhalation has the sound 'HAM'. Try it and see. Our breath itself reminds us that we are part of something much bigger, we are THAT. We aren't individuals but life, there's just life all around. And fundamentally we are all ONE. But we are too caught up in our psychological drama. If only we look beyond that and see, the very way we live life will change. It'll be all inclusive. Which is the most beautiful way to be. :)

Via Daily Dharma: Taking the First Step

Even very basic beginning practice, like mindfulness of the breath or sound, begins to relieve suffering, reduce our stress levels, and motivate us to practice more.

—Interview with Mirabai Bush by Alex Caring-Lobel and Emma Varvaloucas, “Working with Mindfulness”

Via Daily Dharma: Inner Awakening

The taste of freedom that pervades the Buddha’s teaching is the taste of spiritual freedom, which from the Buddhist perspective means freedom from suffering. In the process leading to deliverance from suffering, meditation is the means of generating the inner awakening required for liberation.

—Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, “The Path of Serenity and Insight”

Race and Religion in American Buddhism: White Supremacy and Immigrant Adaptation

Joseph CheahOctober 28, 2011

Oxford University Press

 

While academic and popular studies of Buddhism have often neglected race as a factor of analysis, the issues concerning race and racialization have remained not far below the surface of the wider discussion among ethnic Buddhists, converts, and sympathizers regarding representations of American Buddhism and adaptations of Buddhist practices to the American context. In Race and Religion in American Buddhism, Joseph Cheah provides a much-needed contribution to the field of religious studies by addressing the under-theorization of race in the study of American Buddhism. Through the lens of racial formation, Cheah demonstrates how adaptations of Buddhist practices by immigrants, converts and sympathizers have taken place within an environment already permeated with the logic and ideology of whiteness and white supremacy. In other words, race and religion (Buddhism) are so intimately bounded together in the United States that the ideology of white supremacy informs the differing ways in which convert Buddhists and sympathizers and Burmese ethnic Buddhists have adapted Buddhist religious practices to an American context. Cheah offers a complex view of how the Burmese American community must negotiate not only the religious and racial terrains of the United States but also the transnational reach of the Burmese junta. Race and Religion in American Buddhism marks an important contribution to the study of American Buddhism as well as to the larger fields of U.S. religions and Asian American studies.

About the author

Joseph Cheah is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies and Theology at Saint Joseph College in West Hartford, Connecticut.

 

 

 

Via Daily Dharma: Touching Freedom

When the tug of sense desire and aversion has been quieted, when restlessness and sluggishness have been balanced out, and when doubts are put aside for a time, the mind is able to attend to experience more openly and with much greater freedom.

—Andrew Olendzki, “The Ties that Unbind”