Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - July 1, 2018

The transformation that comes through meditation is not a straight-line progression. It’s a spiral, a cycle. My own life is very much a series of spirals in which at times I am pulled toward some particular form of sadhana or lifestyle and make a commitment to it for maybe six months or a year. After this time I assess its effects. At times I work with external methods such as service. At other times the pull is inward, and I retreat from society to spent more time alone. The timing for these phases in the spiral must be in tune with your inner voice and your outer life.

Don’t get too rigidly attached to any one method – turn to others when their time comes, when you are ripe for them. 

- Ram Dass -

From: The Death of Democracy, Benjamin Carter Hett

Via Daily Dharma: The Subtle Forms of Generosity

Generosity is not limited to the giving of material things. We can be generous with our kindness and our receptivity. Generosity can mean the simple giving of a smile or extending ourselves to really listen to a friend.

—Gil Fronsdal, “Generosity and Greed”

Via Daily Dharma: Savoring Life’s Warmth

When you encounter something positive and healing, pause with it, lighting the lamp of your mindfulness to savor and appreciate it.

—Thomas Bien, “Water the Flowers, Not the Weeds”

Via Purple Buddha Project / 11 Quotes of the Day to Help You Get Through the Day

Life Quotes of the Day

Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.

- Alan W. Watts

“Whether our action is wholesome or unwholesome depends on whether that action or deed arises from a disciplined or undisciplined state of mind. It is felt that a disciplined mind leads to happiness and an undisciplined mind leads to suffering, and in fact it is said that bringing about discipline within one’s mind is the essence of the Buddha’s teaching.”

- Dalai Lama XIV

Try to find pleasure in the speed that you’re not used to. Changing the way you do routine things allows a new person to grow inside of you. But when all is said and done, you’re the one who must decide how you handle it.

- Paulo Coelho

In the way that a gardener knows how to transform compost into flowers, we can learn the art of transforming anger, depression, and racial discrimination into love and understanding. This is the work of meditation.

- Thich Nhat Hanh

The most important thing in all human relationships is conversation, but people don’t talk anymore, they don’t sit down to talk and listen. They go to the theater, the cinema, watch television, listen to the radio, read books, but they almost never talk. If we want to change the world, we have to go back to a time when warriors would gather around a fire and tell stories.

- Paulo Coelho

There are people who are generic. They make generic responses and they expect generic answers. They live inside a box and they think people who don’t fit into their box are weird. But I’ll tell you what, generic people are the weird people. They are like genetically-manipulated plants growing inside a laboratory, like indistinguishable faces, like droids. Like ignorance.

- C. JoyBell C.

The most important thing in all human relationships is conversation, but people don’t talk anymore, they don’t sit down to talk and listen. They go to the theater, the cinema, watch television, listen to the radio, read books, but they almost never talk. If we want to change the world, we have to go back to a time when warriors would gather around a fire and tell stories.

- Paulo Coelho

As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth — whatever the truth may be — that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.

- June Jordan

You’re going to meet many people with domineering personalities: the loud, the obnoxious, those that noisily stake their claims in your territory and everywhere else they set foot on. This is the blueprint of a predator. Predators prey on gentleness, peace, calmness, sweetness and any positivity that they sniff out as weakness. Anything that is happy and at peace they mistake for weakness. It’s not your job to change these people, but it’s your job to show them that your peace and gentleness do not equate to weakness. I have always appeared to be fragile and delicate but the thing is, I am not fragile and I am not delicate. I am very gentle but I can show you that the gentle also possess a poison. I compare myself to silk. People mistake silk to be weak but a silk handkerchief can protect the wearer from a gunshot. There are many people who will want to befriend you if you fit the description of what they think is weak; predators want to have friends that they can dominate over because that makes them feel strong and important. The truth is that predators have no strength and no courage. It is you who are strong, and it is you who has courage. I have lost many friends over the fact that when they attempt to rip me, they can’t. They accuse me of being deceiving; I am not deceiving, I am just made of silk. It is they who are stupid and wrongly take gentleness and fairness for weakness. There are many more predators in this world, so I want you to be made of silk. You are silk.

- C. JoyBell C.

Don’t bother trying to explain your emotions. Live everything as intensely as you can and keep whatever you felt as a gift from God. The best way to destroy the bridge between the visible and invisible is by trying to explain your emotions.

- Paulo Coelho

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

- Mahatma Gandhi

Via Daily Dharma: The Basic Fuel for Practice

Awareness of the truth of suffering and impermanence always provides fertile ground for spiritual practice.

—Pamela Gayle White, “Who Are We Without Our Memories?”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - June 27, 2018

As I have explored my own and others’ journeys toward love, I’ve encountered different types of happiness. There’s pleasure, there’s happiness, and then there’s joy. Addiction, even in the broad sense of just always wanting more of something, gives only pleasure. Pleasure is very earthbound when you’re getting it from sensual interaction, and it always has its opposite; also, the need for satisfaction is never ending.

Happiness is emotional, and emotions come and go. It may play into the complex of other emotional stuff that we all carry. But there is also spiritual happiness, which gets very close to joy. As it becomes less personal, spiritual happiness becomes joy. Joy is being part of the One. It’s spiritual, the joy-full universe, like trees are joyful. It’s bliss, or ananda. It’s all those things. The difference is that it comes from the soul.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Creating Our Karma

The law of karma is one of the fundamental natural laws through which we create vastly different realities. It is as though we are all artists, but instead of canvas and paint, or marble or music, as our medium, our very bodies, minds, and life experience are the materials of our creative expression.

—Joseph Goldstein, “Cause and Effect”

Via Daily Dharma: Come Back To Who You Really Are

Zazen [Zen meditation] practice continually reminds us to unhook from our projects, which always reflect in some way a desire to be elsewhere. We are continually invited to come back to “just this,” to come back to who we really are.

—Julie Nelson, “Sick and Useless Zen”

Via Human Reform Politics

Via Daily Dharma: Life’s Common Thread

What is it that stamps all of experience? What feature does all experience have in common? All experience is groundless, open, empty.

—Ken McLeod, “The Way of Freedom”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - June 24, 2018

When you begin to awaken, you are not coming from such a needy place when you enter into a relationship, not looking to 'lock in' so quickly. Your need is still there as a human incarnation – but you are not so identified with that need because you are already resting in a place of love...

- Ram Dass -

Via Lion’s Roar / Surviving a toxic workplace

06.22.2018

SURVIVING A TOXIC WORKPLACE

I’ve found myself working on a project with a toxic manager. (Don’t worry, it’s not here at Lion’s Roar!) This person is aggressive and adversarial, constantly questioning the professionalism of everyone on the team. Every time I get an email from her, I get a tension headache. When I walk in the building, my limbs feel heavy with dread. Her inner circle is cold and aloof to me. It makes my belly hurt. I sure wish I was one of those people who could just slough it off, saying to myself, It’s her problem. Not mine. I am a pro, doing my work well, and treating people with respect and kindness. But, you know, I can’t just shrug it off. Instead, I am the kind of person who takes it on myself when others don’t like me, thinking I must deserve it. I obviously can’t change her, and I can’t abandon the project. So what can I do? So far, all I’ve come up with is drawing pictures of her as a monster and eating numerous tubs of Haagen-Dazs. Luckily, there are people in the world who can go beyond ice-cream and think a little more spaciously. First, Lama Tsultrim Allione offers a practice for working with demons — inner ones and outer ones (like this manager). In doing this practice, I realize that I have to be there for myself in the situation, working with everything that is arising. Once I have taken care of myself, I can look for ways to be helpful to others on my team. Michael Carroll offers some wisdom for creating a healthy work environment. And, last, using Lodro Rinzler’s Buddhist slogans for the office, maybe I can help create a space where the poison doesn’t take root so strongly in the first place. It’s a lofty goal, but if we pesky humans are trying to change the world for the better, we might as well dream big. Reading these articles helped my shoulders relax. And it made me grateful, once again, that my day job in the dharma can show me ways to work with other areas of my life, so I don’t end up spending my whole paycheck on macadamia nut brittle ice cream. Although, I can’t lie, ice-cream does help a little bit. —Lindsay Kyte, associate editor, Lion's Roar magazine

How to Feed Your Demons

Lama Tsultrim Allione teaches you an innovative technique to turn your inner demons into friends.

In today’s world, we suffer from record levels of inner and outer struggle. We find ourselves ever more polarized, inwardly and outwardly. We need a new paradigm, a fresh approach to conflict. This strategy of nurturing rather than battling our inner and outer enemies offers a revolutionary path to resolve conflict and leads to psychological integration and inner peace.

Make the jump here to red more and the original

Via Tricycle: A Big Gay History of Same-sex Marriage in the Sangha

Buddhists were marrying members of the LGBTQ community long before the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in 2015 (and not making a big deal about it).

Budddhist same-sex marriage was born in the USA. That’s a little known but significant fact to reflect on now, just after the Supreme Court has declared legal marriage equality throughout the country. Appropriately enough, it all started in San Francisco, and was conceived as an act of love, not activism. 

The first known Buddhist same-sex marriages took place in the early 1970s, at the Buddhist Church of San Francisco. Founded in 1899, it’s the oldest surviving temple in the mainland United States.

It’s also part of the oldest Buddhist organization outside Hawaii: the Buddhist Churches of America (BCA), part of the Shin tradition of Pure Land Buddhism.

During the Nixon years, the LGBTQ rights movement was picking up, and San Francisco was one of the primary centers of both activism and community building. Located not far from the famously gay Castro District, the Buddhist Church of San Francisco (BCSF) was attended by singles and couples, gay and straight. As consciousness rose, people began to seek the same services that heterosexuals already enjoyed in American society.

A male couple in the congregation eventually asked Rev. Koshin Ogui, then assigned to BCSF, to perform their marriage. He readily agreed, and the ceremony was held in the main hall—identical to other marriages at the temple, except for the dropping of gender-based pronouns in the service. Without fanfare, history was made.

Soon other BCA temples were also conducting same-sex marriages, and by the time of my research into the subject in the early 2010s, I couldn’t find a single minister in the scores of BCA temples who was unwilling to preside over same-sex weddings. Indeed, BCA ministers had already performed marriages for gay and lesbian couples, bisexuals, transgender people, and polyamorous groups. 

Many of these were interracial marriages, or carried out for non-Buddhists who had nowhere else to go, though most were for members of local BCA temples.

The BCA and its sister organization in Hawaii had gone on record years earlier in support of marriage equality, and even lobbied the government to change the law. This support for LGBTQ rights has been recognized by the Smithsonian, which collected a rainbow-patterned robe worn by the BCSF’s current minister for the museum’s permanent collection.

Related: Becoming Jivaka 

I’m ordained in the Shin tradition, so I was already aware of Shin inclusivity. (Indeed, though I’m not gay myself, I would not have joined any organization that failed to support LGBTQ rights.) But the historian in me itched to explain this phenomenon more comprehensively. Why was the BCA the first Buddhist organization to move toward marriage equality, and why hadn’t this movement provoked rancor and conservative resistance, as we’ve seen in so many other American religious denominations?

In searching for answers, I came to several interrelated conclusions. First, the history of racial and religious discrimination that the originally Japanese-American BCA faced (everything from mob violence to WWII internment camps) instilled revulsion for discrimination in Shin circles. Second, since Shin ministers are not celibate (the tradition was founded by a married monk in 13th-century Japan), they share lifestyles similar to their parishioners, and thus readily empathize with them on matters of sexuality and social relationships, which may be more abstract to celibate monks and nuns.

But most importantly, what minister after minister told me was that the fundamental point of Shin Buddhism is that Amida Buddha embraces all beings without any exceptions, without any judgments, without any discrimination. Amida opens the way to the Pure Land (and thus liberation) to the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the good and the bad, the black and the white. 

Therefore, Amida Buddha also embraces the gay and the straight, the gender-conforming and everyone else, without any hesitation. It is this spirit that led Shin ministers to open their doors to same-sex couples, led Shin temples to march in Pride parades across the country, to pass proclamations affirming same-sex rights and marriage in particular, and to carry out education programs in their own communities.

The Shin community hasn’t been alone in supporting LGBTQ communities in American Buddhist circles. Though not as quickly or comprehensively, many other Buddhist groups have also moved toward performing same-sex marriages and affirming the value of their LGBTQ members. In the 1980s, a handful of same-sex marriages were performed by non-BCA teachers, including Sarika Dharma of the International Buddhist Meditation Center in Los Angeles. By the end of the 1990s, American Tibetan, Theravada, and Zen teachers had all performed the first same-sex marriages in those respective traditions as well, and Soka Gakkai had gone from seeing homosexuality as a condition to be cured through Buddhist practice to performing large numbers of same-sex marriages for its members.

All of this was taking place in a country without legal recognition for married same-sex couples. They performed those ceremonies even though they knew the state would not recognize them, because it was the right thing to do.

Today those marriages are equal to everyone else’s, and there are signs that marriage equality is gaining acceptance in parts of Buddhist Asia. Taiwan held its first Buddhist same-sex marriage in 2012, with two brides in white dresses and veils presided over by a traditional shaven-headed nun. In Kyoto, Japan, Rev. Kawakami Taka of Shunkoin temple not only performs same-sex marriages at his historic Rinzai Zen temple, but has also partnered with local hotel, flower, and similar vendors to provide wedding packages for same-sex couples arriving from around the world. Step by step, the movement continues.

Related: Working Through the Strong Emotions of Sexual Identity 

On Saturday morning, June 27, I gave keynote address for a seminar at the New York Buddhist Church, “Embraced by the Heart of Amida Buddha: The LGBTQ Community and Shin Buddhism.” It’s part of an educational campaign that the BCA’s Center for Buddhist Education carries out every year in late June. Speakers talked about their experiences as gay, lesbian, and transgender Buddhists, and on Sunday we’ll walk in the New York Pride parade with members of the temple. We had no idea that our event would occur at such a historic moment, but now we know that we’ll be marching as an act of pure celebration, rather than hope and defiance.

Despite the positive record of many sanghas and individuals, discrimination and ignorance remain widespread in American Buddhism. That isn’t something that will change overnight with a single Supreme Court decision, no matter how momentous. But we can genuinely take heart that American Buddhists have been working for marriage equality for more than 40 years, and that Buddhists of many traditions spoke out for equality and contributed to the movement that led to today’s ruling.

[This story was first published in 2015]

Make the jump here to read the original and more

Via Daily Dharma: The Joy of Concentration

Unlike sensory pleasure that leads only to an instant of temporary happiness, the joy we feel when we achieve deep concentration brings peace and tranquillity.

—Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, “Desire and Craving”

Ilumina - Deva Premal

"Ó, grandioso sol, sol central Ilumina, ilumina, ilumina, ilumina 

Ó, grandiosa lua no céu Ilumina, ilumina, ilumina, ilumina 

Ó, grandiosa estrela no céu Ilumina, ilumina, ilumina, ilumina 

Ó, grandiosa rainha da floresta Ilumina, ilumina, ilumina, ilumina"

Via Daily Dharma: The Mind’s Shimmering Reflection

Mind is thus neither the source of light, like a shining sun, nor the reflected light of something greater, like the moon, but a shimmering pool of contingent potential, capable of reflecting sun, moon, and any other object that happens to dance upon its surface.

—Andrew Olendzki, “Mind Like A Mirror”

NANCI GRIFFITH - Live! 'From A Distance' The LATE SHOW Irish TV gaye byrne

Via Daily Dharma: Why Less Is More

Doing less helps us savor what we do accomplish. We learn to do less of what is extraneous and engage in fewer self-defeating behaviors, so we craft a productive life that we truly feel good about.

—Marc Lesser, “Do Less, Accomplish More”