Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - May 6, 2018

When I meditate I sit quietly, I withdraw the awareness of my ears hearing, my eyes seeing. I don’t move around much. I sit quietly and I go deep inside. What happens when you grow old? You lose your hearing, you lose your sight, you can’t move around very much. What an ideal time for doing inner work.

Aging has its own beauty. It is a beautiful stage for doing inner work. You have a chance to not be so dependent on social approval. You can be a little more eccentric. You can be more alone. And you can examine loneliness and boredom instead of being afraid of them. There is such an art and a possibility of aging...

- Ram Dass - 

Via Daily Dharma: The Power of Simplicity

The principle of renunciation is not to encourage a state of lack, but to establish as complete a state of simplicity as possible. In that simplicity you can more clearly see those patterns of wanting, not wanting, fearing, hoping, as they take shape.

—Interview with Venerable Ajaan Amaro by Mary Talbot, “Just Another Thing in the Forest”

Via Daily Dharma: Embrace Uncertainty

We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.

—Pema Chödrön, “The Fundamental Ambiguity of Being Human”

Via Daily Dharma: Buddhahood Is Within You

Some people think that one can become a buddha through meditation. This is wrong. The potential for Buddhahood is within your own nature.

—Master Sheng-Yen, “Being Natural”

Via Daily Dharma: Connecting to the Body

In body awareness meditation, we open to a reunion of body and mind by exploring the sensations of our thoughts and feelings.

—Ruth King, “Soothing the Hot Coals of Rage”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - May 2, 2018

Don’t get caught in righteousness; don’t get caught in helping somebody. It doesn’t mean don’t help them; just don’t get caught in it… If you really want to help somebody, instead of helping them for yourself, give up helping anybody. And then just be with them and see what happens. 

-  Ram Dass  -

Via Daily Dharma: Open to Your Feelings

When we open to our feelings as they arise, we create the causes and conditions of mental and physical health.

—Josh Korda, “Flowing Feelings”

Via JMG: Majorities In 44 States Now Back Same-Sex Marriage

Just in from PRRI Polling:

Recent dramatic shifts in support for same-sex marriage are also evident at the state level. Today, majorities in 44 states believe gay and lesbian couples should be allowed to legally marry, compared to only 30 states in 2014.

In only six states does the issue of same-sex marriage garner less than majority support: Alabama (41%), Mississippi (42%), Tennessee (46%), West Virginia (48%), Louisiana (48%), and North Carolina (49%). But notably, only one state, Alabama, has a majority of residents who oppose same-sex marriage.

Substantial regional disparities in views of same-sex marriage are evident. New England is generally more supportive of same-sex marriage than any other region in the U.S. Roughly eight in ten residents of Vermont (80%), Massachusetts (80%), and Rhode Island (78%) support the policy.

And nearly three-quarters of Americans living in Connecticut (73%), New Hampshire (73%), and Maine (71%) support it. A number of Southern states have only a slim majority expressing support for same-sex marriage, such as Kentucky (51%), Arkansas (52%), and Georgia (52%).

Read the original and more at JMG here

Via Daily Dharma: True Peace

Suffering comes to an end only when a person is so in touch with life that he or she is completely at peace, regardless of physical or emotional circumstances.

—Ken McLeod, “Bodhicitta Explained”

Via Daily Dharma: Uncontrollable Joy

We can’t control joy. It is something that bobs up when we are truly alive and meet the whole world in an instant.

—Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, “Simple Joy”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - April 29, 2018

It is important, as we get older, to learn how to grieve. Although this may sound self-evident, experience has taught me that it is not. In a culture that emphasizes stoicism and forward movement, in which time is deemed “of the essence,” and there is little toleration for slowness, inwardness, and melancholy, grieving – a healthy, necessary aspect of life – is too often overlooked.

Over the years, in working with people who are grieving, I’ve encouraged them first of all to surrender to the experience of their pain. To counteract our natural tendency to turn away from pain, we open to it as fully as possible and allow our hearts to break. We must take enough time to remember our losses – be they friends or loved ones passed away, the death of long-held hopes or dreams, the loss of homes, careers, or countries, or health we may never get back again. Rather than close ourselves to grief, it helps to realize that we only grieve for what we love. 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Humility and Pilgrimage

There is humility in the act of pilgrimage, akin to the act of bowing; you’re surrendering your own path to follow where others have gone before.

—Pico Iyer, “The Long Road to Sitting Still”

Via Daily Dharma: Where’s Your Sense of Adventure?

As spiritual practitioners we need to have some curiosity about the unknown. When unexplored territory frightens us, we need to ask ourselves, “Where’s our sense of adventure?”

—Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel, “Open Stillness”

Via Daily Dharma: You Are Already Complete

Why is it that we yearn to be more or other than we are? It so rarely occurs to us that what we are looking for maybe—indeed, always is—already within us, simply undiscovered.

—Toinette Lippe, “Between Eternities”

Via Daily Dharma: How to Cultivate Equanimity

If a mind state or emotion or mood becomes strong—feelings such as sadness or happiness or anger or desire, restlessness or excitement, interest or rapture, joy or calm—make the mental note of that mind state, feeling it and observing how that too is part of the passing show. It arises, it is there for some time, it passes away.

—Joseph Goldstein, “Breathing”

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

There is great delight in tuning through a variety of different methods, and really looking to each method to move you in its own unique way while continuing to open you up. So be very generous in your opening to methods, because if you bring to them a pure heart and a yearning to be free, they will serve you in that way.

The way you get your karmuppance with methods, if you use them for power, you get power - but then you are stuck with the power. If you use them to reinforce your separateness, you get left in your separateness...

 - Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Dismantling Delusion

To experience the everyday sublime one needs to dismantle piece by piece the perceptual conditioning that insists on seeing oneself and the world as essentially comfortable, permanent, solid, and mine.

—Stephen Batchelor, “The Everyday Sublime”

Via Daily Dharma: Active Refuge

Committing to this path is not an act that we can carry out once and for all, like a “conversion” or a baptism, but an act that must be renewed each day.

—Fabrice Midal, “Brief Teachings”

Happy Earth Day!

Happy Earth Day!

The environment is not merely the place where we live and act, for the biosphere is the ground from which and within which we arise. The earth is not only our home, it is our mother.

—David Loy, “Healing Ecology”