In the early stages of sadhana (spiritual work), you take your dominant thing and you work with it. You keep doing it and doing it, and you love it, and it gets thicker and thicker. But later on in your sadhana, for me anyway, I began to taste freedom and yearn for it so much that I looked and I shifted around.

There’s a point where you go towards the fire of purification, towards the places you’re stuck. You can feel where your stuff is – what’s got your number, and you realize that as long as there’s any aversion left in you, you’re stuck and you end up wanting to eat your aversions.

Via Daily Dharma / Everything Is Useful

 Whatever the circumstance, bodily movement or stillness, feeling well or distressed, with good concentration or scattered attention, everything can be brought back to awareness.

—Kittisaro, "Tangled in Thought"

Via Daily Dharma / Finding Stability in Impermanence

Change is good, we’re told. A fresh breeze blown through life keeps us on our toes, fully alive until we die.

—Joan Duncan Oliver, "Love, Loss and the Grocery Store"

Via Daily Dharma / Moments Make a Life

Our entire lives are nothing but a chain of moments in which we perceive one sight, taste, smell, touch, sound, feeling, or thought after another. Outside of this process, nothing else happens.

—Cynthia Thatcher, "What’s So Great About Now?"

In the clarity of a quiet mind, there is room for all that is actually happening and whatever else might also be possible.

As we've discovered, it is possible to notice a single thought, sensation, or situation arise, but not get totally lost in identifying with it. We observe the cloud but remain focused on the sky, see the leaf but hold in vision the river. We are that which is aware of the totality. And our skills develop with practice.

First, we have to appreciate the value of such qualities of mind and desire to develop them. Next, we have to have faith in the possibility that we can indeed make progress. Finally, we have to explore and practice appropriate techniques.

Twenty minutes per day of such practice can lead to results and the incentive to go deeper still. Continuous practice brings about great transformation of mind and leads to a new quality of service.

Via Daily Dharma / Forgiveness Liberates

I think the reason that remarkable stories of forgiveness take our breath away is that we instantly feel the liberation in the lifting of boundaries, the end of separation, of “inside” and “outside.”

—Roshi Nancy Mujo Baker, "The Seventh Zen Precept"

Via Daily Dharma / Do Less, Live More:

It has been said, and with good reason, that dying people never wish they had spent more time in the office. Doing matters little to the dying. As death draws near, it is relationships—with family, with friends, with God—that hold the greatest appeal.

—Dr. William Thomas, as quoted in C. W. Huntington, Jr.'s "The Miracle of the Ordinary"

Via vice.com/Broadly: Trump Strips LGBT People of Workplace Protections, Then Erases Them from Census

This week, President Trump quietly nullified an order that required companies receiving large federal contracts to show that they have complied with various federal laws, many of which relate to discrimination in the workplace.

Below is what happened on Trump's 47th day in office. You can find out what damage was done every other day so far on the Saddest Calendar on the Internet.
 
Not even two weeks after the US Department of Health and Human Services eliminated questions about LGBT people on two crucial national surveys on the elderly and the disabled, the Trump administration extended their erasure of LGBT Americans yesterday when they announced they would not include the option to declare sexual orientation and gender identity on the 2020 US Census. Earlier in the morning, LGBT advocates thought they had a triumph, as the Census Bureau released a list of proposed subjects for 2020 that included questions relating to the above, which were new additions that LGBT rights advocates have been pushing for. But then the Census Bureau made a follow-up announcement.

"The Subjects Planned for the 2020 Census and American Community Survey report released today inadvertently listed sexual orientation and gender identity as a proposed topic in the appendix," the Census Bureau said in a statement. "This topic is not being proposed to Congress for the 2020 Census or American Community Survey."

The mistake was more than just a gaffe, as advocates have been stressing the need for the Census to acknowledge the gender and sexuality of those from whom its collecting data to ensure that LGBT people are getting equal access to the rights and protections granted to heterosexual and cisgender individuals. In a statement from the National LGBTQ Task Force, Criminal and Economic Justice Project Director Meghan Maury expressed her organization's disappointment.

Continue reading on Broadly.

Via Ike's Man-Cave / FB:

Via Daily Dharma / Finding a New Kind of Connection

As a student of the dharma, I believe that what we call difference in the negative sense of the word is only a perceived lack of connection, and that difference offers the potential to create or manifest connection in a new and fulfilling way.

—Patricia Mushim Ikeda, "Not What I Thought"

Via Daily Dharma / Managing Your Corner of the Universe

Zen practice, however, teaches you to completely be yourself—if you don’t, who will? Someone’s got to hold down your corner of the universe, and no one else is qualified.

—Shozan Jack Haubner, "Middle Way Manager"

Via ThinkProgress: Trump revokes executive order, weakens protections for LGBT workers

LET ME BE CLEAR: if you voted for Donald Trump, you voted to attack me and people like me. 

You voted to roll back our civil and human rights, allow discrimination against us, and relegate us once again to second-class status. You voted to allow this evil man and his monstrous administration to come after LGBT people, our families, our lives, our jobs, and our love. We warned you, we tried to reason with you, some of us even pleaded with you... but you did it anyway, and then you had the gall to gaslight us, telling us we were wrong to worry about Trump because he managed to spit out the letters "LGBTQ" at his convention and grabbed a rainbow flag onstage once. But whaddya know -- we were right after all, and the destruction of our basic civil liberties that your vote has enabled is unfolding now before our very eyes.

We will defeat this evil because we will outlive and outlast and outfight it, but we will *never* forget the way you voted to oppress and degrade and dehumanize us. 

SHAME on you.

----- 

An executive order President Trump signed Monday rescinded an executive order President Obama implemented that would have required companies that contract with the federal government to provide documentation about their compliance with various federal laws. Some have argued that this will make it harder to enforce the LGBT protections President Obama implemented for employees of federal contractors — as well as many other protections those workers enjoyed.

Trump rescinded the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces order, also known as Executive Order 13673, that President Obama issued in 2014. That order required companies wishing to contract with the federal government to show that they’ve complied with various federal laws and other executive orders. 

Notably, Obama issued that order in tandem with Executive Order 13672, which prohibited contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Executive Order 13673 was enjoined by a federal judge in Texas back in October, but had it been implemented, it would have improved accountability for businesses that contract with the federal government. Enforcement of 13672, the LGBT protections, does not require this order, but would have been stronger with it. Whatever its fate in court may have been, it’s now gone forever.

LGBT people are particularly vulnerable to discrimination, even with 13672 still in place. Obama’s LGBT executive order amended previous presidential orders that also protected the employees of contractors on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, and age, but all of those other categories are also afforded protection under various federal laws (the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act). Sexual orientation and gender identity are the only identity categories without explicit nondiscrimination protections under federal law, and fewer than half the states offer LGBT protections at the state level. 

That means Obama’s executive order is the only legal force protecting over a million workers.

Camilla Taylor, senior counsel at Lambda Legal, was the first to raise concerns that this change would impact the LGBT community. As she explained to Keen News Service, “It’s sending a message to these companies…that the federal government simply doesn’t care whether or not they violate the law.”

National Center for Lesbian Rights Executive Director Kate Kendell also said in a statement, “President Trump’s quiet take-down yesterday of federal safeguards against employment discrimination for millions of LGBT Americans is yet another example of why our elected officials, advocates, and our community must remain vigilant and continue working together to stop this administration’s regressive and harmful policies.”

When a draft of a “religious freedom” executive order that would have licensed discrimination against LGBT people was circulating, the White House tried to stir up some positive press by promising that it would “leave in place” Obama’s 2014 order protecting LGBT workers.

“President Trump continues to be respectful and supportive of LGBTQ rights,” the statement read. 

The New York Times’ Jeremy Peters fell over himself to praise the statement for using “stronger language than any Republican president has before in favor of equal legal protections for gay lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.”

It’s not a surprise, however, that Trump is walking back other executive orders that weaken the LGBT protections. Trump promised to undo all of Obama’s executive orders.

That “religious freedom” executive order hasn’t gone away either. 

A month after the draft leaked and the White House assured LGBT people it wasn’t signing it at that time, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told The Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal that it was still coming. “I think we’ve discussed executive orders in the past, and for the most part we’re not going to get into discussing what may or may not come until we’re ready to announce it,” he said at the time. “So I’m sure as we move forward we’ll have something.”

Make the jump here to read the original article and more 

Via Towleroad: Trump Administration Erases LGBT People from Key 2020 Census Survey

An announcement of Subjects Planned for the 2020 Census and American Community Survey put out by the Census Bureau which included Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity on its list was scrubbed and revised on Tuesday, reappearing without LGBT people as a designated group.

RELATED: Trump Administration Erases LGBT People from Key Annual HHS Survey of Older and Disabled Americans

The Washington Blade reports:

With days before its deadline, the U.S. Census delivered to Congress its report on planned subjects for the survey, including gender, age, race, ethnicity, relationship and homeownership status. Under law, the report is due three years before Census Day, with the next one is set to occur April 1, 2020….

…The report outlines the importance of including these questions in either the decennial U.S. Census or the newer and more detailed annual American Community Survey, which was established in 1985 and seeks to ascertain socio-economic and housing statistics.

But apparently an initial version of this report went too far. The U.S. Census issued a notice shortly afterward indicating the report was corrected because the initial appendix “inadvertently” included LGBT categories.

“The Subjects Planned for the 2020 Census and American Community Survey report released today inadvertently listed sexual orientation and gender identity as a proposed topic in the appendix,” the statement says. “The report has been corrected.”

The National LGBTQ Task Force posted an image (above) of the erasure on its website.
Said Meghan Maury, Criminal and Economic Justice Project Director, National LGBTQ Task Force, in a statement:

“Today, the Trump Administration has taken yet another step to deny LGBTQ people freedom, justice, and equity, by choosing to exclude us from the 2020 Census and American Community Survey. LGBTQ people are not counted on the Census—no data is collected on sexual orientation or gender identity. Information from these surveys helps the government to enforce federal laws like the Violence Against Women Act and the Fair Housing Act and to determine how to allocate resources like housing supports and food stamps. If the government doesn’t know how many LGBTQ people live in a community, how can it do its job to ensure we’re getting fair and adequate access to the rights, protections and services we need?”

Last week, the Trump administration erased LGBT people from a key annual Health and Human Services survey of older and disabled Americans.

Via Ram Dass

God
and I have become
like two giant fat people living
in a tiny
boat.

We
keep bumping into
each other
and laughing.

- Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz

Via Daily Dharma / Nature's Perspective

Animals are people, too. As are plants. And water. And soil. This is the fundamental insight at the heart of all eco-spiritual work. But to get that insight, we have to get with the big picture. To get that insight, we have to climb a tree.

—Clark Strand, "Trees, Butterflies, and the Buddhist Moral Life"

Via Daily Dharma / Understanding Across Difference

Understanding across difference, whatever the difference, lies at the center of spiritual life and aspiration.

—Henry Shukman, "The Meeting"

Freedom to Marry

Via Daily Dharma / Free Time vs. Freedom

Free time is of a different order than free-dom. Freedom, at least in the dharmic sense, depends on the quality of attention that we bring to our interactions. Only to the extent that we can be fully present in our relationships with ourselves, with our children, and with each other, are we free.

—Soren Gordhamer, "Finding What’s Right in Front of Us"

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - March 26, 2017

You learn not to act out your emotions, but just to appreciate and acknowledge them. That’s part of the way you can use them spiritually. You don’t deny them, you don’t push them down. You acknowledge that, “I’m angry,” but you don’t have to say, “Hey, I’m angry!” You acknowledge it; you don’t deny it. That’s the key.

So, the way you would use emotions in devotional practices is aiming them towards God. For the other kinds of emotional realms, you witness them and you sit with them, and you watch them change and come and go, and you don’t deny them, you allow them; because that’s part of your human condition.

When you talk about service, you’ll see that it awakens intense emotions, and you have to let your heart break. But you’ve cultivated another plane of reality, which is the one that notices and allows it. A quality of equanimity that lies with it.