Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - October 10, 2018

A lot of people try to counteract the ‘I am not good enough’ with ‘I am good enough.’ In other words, they take the opposite and they try to invest it. That still keeps the world at the level of polarities. The art is to go behind the polarities. So the act is to go not to the world of ‘I am good’ to counteract ‘I am bad,’ or ‘I am lovable’ as opposed to ‘I am unlovable.’ But go behind it to ‘I am.’ I am. I am. And I am includes the fact that I do crappy things and I do beautiful things and I am. That includes everything and I am.

- Ram Dass -

The four immeasurables

Os quatro incomensuráveis - bondade amorosa, compaixão, alegria pela fortuna dos outros e equanimidade (The four immeasurables—loving kindness, compassion, rejoicing for others’ fortune, and equanimity) 

—Interview with Edward Simon by Gabriel Lefferts, “This Buddhist Life: Edward Simon”

Via Daily Dharma: Foundations First

If you want to be better at what you do—no matter what that may be—you want to start by being a better human being.

—Interview with Edward Simon by Gabriel Lefferts, “This Buddhist Life: Edward Simon”

Via Daily Dharma: Observe the Breath

When we truly observe the breath, we are automatically placed in the present. We are pulled out of the morass of mental images and into a bare experience of the here-and-now.

—Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, “Breathing”

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

When you are experiencing fear, you are caught in your separateness. When you are experiencing love, you are caught in your unity with all things. Love, the verb love, is a vehicle of permeating boundaries. You feel the quality of love which means a flow of energy or merging with the universe around you. That one is obviously the antidote for fear. It´s going to the place behind your own separateness.

- Ram Dass -

META pra Brasil!

Que todos os seres encontrem a felicidade e as causas da felicidade.
Que todos os seres se libertem do sofrimento e das causas do sofrimento.
Que todos os seres encontrem a felicidade livre de sofrimento.
Que todos os seres vivam em equanimidade livres de paixões, de agressões e de preconceitos!

- Buda -

May all beings find happiness and the causes of happiness.
May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
May all beings find happiness free from suffering.
May all beings live in equanimity free from passions, aggressions and prejudices!

- Buddha -

Via Daily Dharma: Finding Freedom

What is freedom? It is nothing more, and nothing less, than life lived awake.

—Ken McLeod, “Forget Happiness”

Via Daily Dharma: Anchor Yourself in the Present Moment

The practice of meditation isn’t confined... to what happens when we’re practicing sitting meditation. We want to learn to be present, to use the breath as an anchor to the present moment, to cultivate ease and wellbeing, in all postures, at all times.

—Peter Doobinin, “Tough Lovingkindness”

Via Daily Dharma: Weathering Life’s Storms

When we take the one seat on our meditation cushion we become our own monastery. We create the compassionate space that allows for the arising of all things: sorrows, loneliness, shame, desire, regret, frustration, happiness.

—Jack Kornfield, “Take The One Seat”

Via Daily Dharma: Turn Towards Pain

In order to emerge from our pain, we have to enter it... when we thus relate to our pain, cultivating intimacy with it, we start liberating ourselves from our pain and from the painful consequences of avoiding our pain.

—Robert Augustus Masters, “A Painless Present”

Via Daily Dharma: Inspiration in Meditation

The key to maintaining your inspiration in the day-to-day work of meditation practice is to approach it as play—a happy opportunity to master practical skills, to raise questions, experiment, and explore. This is precisely how the Buddha himself taught meditation.

—Thanissaro Bhikkhu, “The Joy of Effort”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - October 3, 2018

When you give another human being, your family, or your business, the fullness of your being at any moment, a little is enough. When you give them half of it, because you’re time binding with your mind, there is never enough. You begin to hear the secret that being fully in the present moment is the greatest gift you can give to each situation.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Use Compassion to Connect

Compassion allows us to use our own pain and the pain of others as a vehicle for connection... Because compassion is a state of mind that is itself open, abundant, and inclusive, it allows us to meet pain more directly... we know that we are not alone in our suffering and that no one need feel alone when in pain.

—Sharon Salzberg, “A Quiver of the Heart”

Via Daily Dharma: Bare Awareness

What we regard as the self appears to be a solid, personal identity that perceives things. But in truth there is no metabeing who unifies the parts. All our actions happen without an agent, or self, performing them. There is no seer, just the seeing; no hearer, just the hearing.

—Cynthia Thatcher, “Disconnect the Dots”

Via Daily Dharma: Exponential Love

If we can keep from grasping at others with the selfish fear of losing them... then the energy of love increases and its quality of giving energy to others opens and expands.

—Thinley Rinpoche, “Continuous Mind”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - September 30, 2018

When you are in the presence of unconditional love, that is the optimum environment for your heart to open, because you feel safe, because you realize nobody wants anything from you. The minute your heart opens, you are once again getting into the flow. And that flow is where you experience God. 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: The Space We Need

Noticing the space around people and things provides a different way of looking at them, and developing this spacious view is a way of opening oneself. When one has a spacious mind, there is room for everything.

—Ajahn Sumedho, “Noticing Space”

Via Daily Dharma: Riding the Wave of the Universe

To live is to let go, and in order to live fully we must learn to let go fully and to embrace the flow that is the universe.

—Bodhipaksa, “What You’re Made Of”

Via Daily Dharma: Shared Happiness Is True Happiness

Happiness is not happiness unless it is shared. For happiness is the one thing in all the world that comes to us only at the moment we give it, and is likewise increased by being given away.

—Clark Strand, “The Wisdom Of Frogs”