Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - September 26, 2018

When I look back on the suffering in my life, this may sound really strange, but I see it now as a gift. I would have never asked for it for a second. I hated it while it was happening and I protested as loudly as I could, but suffering happened anyway. Now, in retrospect I see the way in which it deepened my being immeasurably.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Watching Your Thoughts Disperse

Thoughts are like clouds and can vanish just as clouds naturally disperse into space.

—Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche and Tsoknyi Rinpoche, “As the Clouds Vanish”

Via Daily Dharma: The Dharma Shapes Us

The Buddha’s teachings are something enduring that shapes us, if we slow down enough to take them in. We’re not a big deal ... but the dharma is.

—Mary Talbot, “Old Tibet Meets the American Midwest”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - September 23, 2018

When I start to get angry, I see my predicament and how I’m getting caught in expectations and righteousness. Learning to give up anger has been a continuous process. When Maharaji told me to love everyone and tell the truth, he also said, “Give up anger, and I’ll help you with it.”
Maharaji offered me a bargain: “You must polish the mirror free of anger to see God. If you give up a little anger each day, I will help you.” This seemed to be a deal that was more than fair. I readily accepted. And he’s been true to his end of the bargain. I found that his love helped to free me from my righteousness. Ultimately I would rather be free and in love than be right.

-  Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Compassion For All

In difficult situations, [compassion] gives us the power to find a path that meets the vital interests of all concerned when possible and to minimize the pain when that is not possible. Compassion cuts through beliefs and goes straight to the heart.

—Ken McLeod, “Why Compassion?”

Via Ram Dass: How can we reconcile our spirituality and our religion?

How can we reconcile our spirituality and our religion?

Posted August 23, 2018

There was a great moment when I asked Trungpa Rinpoche for some meditation instruction.

He was sitting there with this saki bottle and he said, “What you should be doing now is this form of yoga called Ati yoga.” And he says, “You just will expand out, let’s do it.” So we sat there looking at each other and started to meditate.

Then after about 20 seconds he says, “Ram Dass?” I said, “Yes?” He said, “Are you trying?” I said, “Yes I’m trying!” He said, “No Ram Dass, don’t try, just do it.” I realized that in my zeal towards enlightenment, I’d turned it into another Jewish middle-class achievement task.

So this spiritual group started seeking disciplines and paths and practices and got very enamored of Eastern Wisdom, and this was earlier before the full response of the Western Religions in which they finally recognized that they had to make the esoteric more available, that they had to give up some power, because within the Eastern traditions the esoteric was available.

When people started to have these esoteric experiences, they were so thick, so fast, and so different, that it was ineffable – very hard to explain. There was no way I could even start to conceive of explaining it. I mean, it’s like, take this moment, how would you describe it? If you all gave a description, it would still fall short of the totality of what it was.

I think that my child rearing through the Jewish Conservative Reform track, if that had had enough spiritual sustenance in it, I might have turned to things like Kabbalah or Hasidic literature, and to Nachman, or to Baal Shem Tov or someone like that. But I still had such a reaction to the kind of social-political attachments to Judaism.

I was just looking for something that was touching a deeper place in me, than had never been touched by Judaism. Not that it couldn’t be, but that it had never happened.

So to me, the maps that were available clearly pointed toward the East, but as the years went by and I got to around 1967, I realized that nobody in the West knew how to read the maps. I mean, there were some that did, but I just didn’t know them, of course.

So basically, I went to the East looking for a map reader, and I found in my guru such a being. The best thing I can say about the quality of him was that over the few times I knew him, when he was in his body between ’67 and ’73, there were very few times I could ever find him.

What I recognized with him was that what I had been able to touch with acid, he could have without it.

We gave it to him. Nothing happened, because if you’re in Detroit, you don’t have to take a bus to Detroit. There was nowhere for him to go, he stayed in that space. We were looking to go somewhere, to change something, because we were holding somewhere. He wasn’t holding anywhere.

-Ram Dass

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Via Daily Dharma: Social Awakening

We must reclaim the concept of awakening from an exclusively individualistic therapeutic model and focus on how individual liberation also requires social transformation.

—David Loy, “Awakening in the Age of Climate Change”

Via Daily Dharma: The Wisdom Within You

Wisdom isn’t something you can “do” or “make happen”—it’s there in all of us. By becoming more familiar with that space within ourselves and trusting our own instincts more fully, we can learn to apply this quality of discriminating wisdom in everyday life.

—Andy Puddicombe, “10 Tips for Living More Mindfully”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - September 19, 2018

The quality of the heart is that it loves without discrimination, it just loves, it has no boundaries. The mind is continually setting boundaries. 'This is me, this is not me, this is good, this is bad.'

The mind is constantly judging, the heart is not judging, the heart is just opening. The heart is without boundaries, so the mind is actually afraid of the heart. That's what the interesting thing is, the battle that goes on in us - you're afraid of your own heart because your heart will give away the store.

The heart says, ‘You need my car, you need my house, you need my life, take it.’ And the mind is saying, ‘Now wait a minute. You've got your health insurance to pay, keep cool, don't blow the whole scene.’

So the interesting question is when and under what conditions can you meet people in such a way that you can keep your heart open without giving up your discriminative wisdom about how to be with another person.

- Ram Dass

From our new free 4-week online course 'The Yoga of Relationships: Exploring Connection and Sexuality Through the Lens of the Soul" - beginning September 24th.

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Via Daily Dharma: Embody Full Presence

In meditation, we train in letting go of thoughts of the past and future as they arise, and in tuning in to full, immediate presence instead.

—Pamela Gayle White, “What Our Memories Make Us”

Via Daily Dharma: The Language of Compassion

Nonviolent Communication... is a method for resolving conflict by expressing needs without blame or criticism, then listening and responding empathically.

—Katy Butler, “Say it Right”

Via Pinterest / Mudras

Via Daily Dharma: Embrace Your Shortcomings

Peace and kindness have their best shot at establishing themselves when we accept our own inadequacy, when limitation and error become aspects of ourselves we can embrace rather than strive to mask.

—Henry Shukman, “The Art of Being Wrong”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - September 16, 2018

"It’s amazing how the nature of your relationships change when it’s coming out of love instead of trying to get love."

- Ram Dass

From our new free 4-week online course 'The Yoga of Relationships: Exploring Connection and Sexuality Through the Lens of the Soul" - beginning September 24th.

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Via Daily Dharma: Trust in the Three Jewels

We can choose to take refuge in the brilliant sanity of enlightenment, the Buddha; trust the process of the path, the Dharma; and rely on the experience of those who guide us along the path, the Sangha.

—Lama Tsony, “Facing Fear”

Via Daily Dharma: Pure Selflessness

The act of giving purifies intention, the quality of mind with which any action is undertaken. For a brief moment, the giver’s self-absorption is lifted, attachment to the gift is relinquished, and kindness towards the recipient is developed.

—Andrew Olendzki, “The Wisdom of Giving”

Via Daily Dharma: Respecting Pain

How do we develop this appreciation of things just as they are, especially if we are sick and in pain? We must treat our pain gently, respectfully, not resisting it but living with it.

—Darlene Cohen, “The Practice of Nonpreference”

Via Daily Dharma: Positive Qualities Within

As progress is made on the path, the positive qualities required for further advancement will become part of you, and you will gradually learn how to assimilate and become these positive qualities, rather than regarding them as something to be attained and possessed.

—Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche, “Letting Go of Spiritual Experience”

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