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”

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

Individual differences are not better or worse, merely different. If we forgo judging, we come to understand that each of us has a unique predicament that requires a unique journey. While we share the overall journey, everyone's particular experiences are his or her own. No set of experiences is a prerequisite for enlightenment. People have become enlightened in all ways. Just be what you are.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: The Ultimate Inclusiveness

Compassion is the ultimate inclusiveness, arising whenever we overcome the illusion of our separateness from others.

—Henry Shukman, “Is the Dharma Democratic?”

Via Tricycle: An Interview with Zen Priest Greg Snyder on Brooklyn Zen Center’s Undoing Patriarchy Sangha

Brooklyn Zen Center’s Undoing Patriarchy and Unveiling the Sacred Masculine group is a response to the unacknowledged forms of patriarchy that exist within Buddhist communities as well as society at large. Co-facilitated by Greg Snyder, co-founder and president of BZC and senior director of Buddhist Studies at Union Theological Seminary, and Lama Rod Owens, guiding teacher for Radical Dharma Boston Collective, the group meets monthly and had its second annual weekend retreat in January.

Here, Snyder speaks about how Buddhists can use their practice to confront patriarchy rather than conform to it.

Zen priest Greg Snyder

Why did you start this group? 

Our first retreat, which Lama Rod Owens and I co-led in January 2017, was an attempt to address the fact that patriarchy is still thriving in the Buddhist tradition despite the tools for self-examination that Buddhism presents us with. During that retreat, we tried to examine internalized patriarchal masculinity the same way we’d examine greed, hate, and delusion. The participants came out with a desire to meet regularly, so we started the monthly group. 

The purpose is similar to that of BZC’s monthly Undoing Whiteness and Oppression group. Undoing Patriarchy is just a group of men who are trying to take responsibility for how they represent their gender identity.

Has the group changed over time?

It became evident right away that we should understand masculinity as an energy rather than something tied to a particular body. From there we’ve been trying to find a nonviolent, loving expression of that energy. 

As the group continued, it became more obvious that supporting one another is extremely important. These are cisgender and transgender men with many different racial identities, but there is a feeling of love in the room despite all the violence expressed historically between the various groups. This loving connection is one of the most critical pieces of undoing the typical male relationship, which usually involves hierarchy, competition, and apathy toward each other.

Make the jump here to read the full article and more on Tricycle

Via Daily Dharma: Do the Right Thing—with Ease

A noble person does not do good because of willpower. She does it through a combination of, on the one hand, modesty about self, and, on the other hand, faith in a higher purpose, a higher meaning, in powers more potent than self-will.

—David Brazier, “Other-Power”

I Quit!

Via Daily Dharma: To Be Home Is To Be Known

Home cannot be an experience of shame, terror, or rejection, but rather one of safety, freedom, and respect, an experience of love and being embrace, of being known and knowing who you are.

—Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, “The Hunger for Home”

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

Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise. 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Spiritual Practice and the Bigger Picture

Through spiritual practice we can go beyond our egoistic point of view. We can touch the core of time, see the whole world in a moment, and understand time in deep relationship with all beings.

—Dainin Katagiri Roshi, “Time Revisited”

Via Daily Dharma: Being Truly Human

Freedom from identity is what allows and enables us to be truly human—to be an ongoing response to the challenges, demands, and needs of life.

—Ken McLeod, “Forget About Being A Buddhist. Be A Human.”

Via Daily Dharma: How Do You Relate to the World?

Stretching our capacity for loving-friendliness sometimes requires that we make a great sacrifice—but what we sacrifice are our comfort, thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. In other words, we sacrifice our old way of relating to the world.

—Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, “Overcoming Ill Will”

Via Daily Dharma: The Antidote to Hatred

Lovingkindness is the antidote to hatred. That is why cultivating it is so beneficial. The practice is about your being able to access and cultivate the healthiest parts of yourself, without allowing anyone to obstruct that.

—Andrew Olendzki, “No Exceptions”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - February 21, 2018

  Did you ever have a bad day? Everything seems to go wrong and you are completely lost in anger, frustration and self-pity. It gets worse and worse, until the final moment when, say, you have just missed the last bus. There is some critical point where it gets so bad that the absurdity of it all overwhelms you and you can do nothing but laugh. At that moment you uplevel your predicament, you see the cosmic joke in your own suffering.

Humor puts things in perspective. There are many levels of humor - there is a humor of survival, a humor of sex and gratification, a humor connected with power. Beyond all these there is a humor that is filled with compassion. It is reflected in the tiny upturn in the mouth of the Buddha, for he sees the humor in the universal predicament: All beings are lost in illusion, yet he knows that they will awaken from that illusion for they are, at heart, already enlightened. He knows that what seems so hard for them is, from another perspective, their own path to liberation.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Don’t Go It Alone

The sangha speaks to the idea that self-reliance can manifest only when we ourselves are in good health—we aren’t meant to go at it alone.

—Elizabeth Zach, “Health Care for All Beings”

Via Daily Dharma: A Living Tradition

We now have a choice, even if we want to insist on cleaving to Buddhist tradition. Do we emphasize the more authoritarian parts of the tradition, or the more democratic ones?

—James Kierstead, “Democratic from the Start”

Via Daily Dharma: Buddhist Politics

A Buddhist would not hesitate to vote for legislation and political candidates devoted to peace, to undoing injustice, reducing duhkha in its myriad manifestations, healing society’s wounds, and preserving individual freedoms and the environment.

—Charles Johnson, “Accepting the Invitation”

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

Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery. 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Everyday Presence

Presence need not be confined to the time spent sitting on our meditation cushion. Every single moment provides an opportunity to relax the tension in the body and unconscious thought patterns in the mind.

—Will Johnson, “Full Body, Empty Mind”