Via Daily Dharma: Anchor Yourself in the Present Moment

The practice of meditation isn’t confined... to what happens when we’re practicing sitting meditation. We want to learn to be present, to use the breath as an anchor to the present moment, to cultivate ease and wellbeing, in all postures, at all times.

—Peter Doobinin, “Tough Lovingkindness”

Via Daily Dharma: Weathering Life’s Storms

When we take the one seat on our meditation cushion we become our own monastery. We create the compassionate space that allows for the arising of all things: sorrows, loneliness, shame, desire, regret, frustration, happiness.

—Jack Kornfield, “Take The One Seat”

Via Daily Dharma: Turn Towards Pain

In order to emerge from our pain, we have to enter it... when we thus relate to our pain, cultivating intimacy with it, we start liberating ourselves from our pain and from the painful consequences of avoiding our pain.

—Robert Augustus Masters, “A Painless Present”

Via Daily Dharma: Inspiration in Meditation

The key to maintaining your inspiration in the day-to-day work of meditation practice is to approach it as play—a happy opportunity to master practical skills, to raise questions, experiment, and explore. This is precisely how the Buddha himself taught meditation.

—Thanissaro Bhikkhu, “The Joy of Effort”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - October 3, 2018

When you give another human being, your family, or your business, the fullness of your being at any moment, a little is enough. When you give them half of it, because you’re time binding with your mind, there is never enough. You begin to hear the secret that being fully in the present moment is the greatest gift you can give to each situation.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Use Compassion to Connect

Compassion allows us to use our own pain and the pain of others as a vehicle for connection... Because compassion is a state of mind that is itself open, abundant, and inclusive, it allows us to meet pain more directly... we know that we are not alone in our suffering and that no one need feel alone when in pain.

—Sharon Salzberg, “A Quiver of the Heart”

Via Daily Dharma: Bare Awareness

What we regard as the self appears to be a solid, personal identity that perceives things. But in truth there is no metabeing who unifies the parts. All our actions happen without an agent, or self, performing them. There is no seer, just the seeing; no hearer, just the hearing.

—Cynthia Thatcher, “Disconnect the Dots”

Via Daily Dharma: Exponential Love

If we can keep from grasping at others with the selfish fear of losing them... then the energy of love increases and its quality of giving energy to others opens and expands.

—Thinley Rinpoche, “Continuous Mind”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - September 30, 2018

When you are in the presence of unconditional love, that is the optimum environment for your heart to open, because you feel safe, because you realize nobody wants anything from you. The minute your heart opens, you are once again getting into the flow. And that flow is where you experience God. 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: The Space We Need

Noticing the space around people and things provides a different way of looking at them, and developing this spacious view is a way of opening oneself. When one has a spacious mind, there is room for everything.

—Ajahn Sumedho, “Noticing Space”

Via Daily Dharma: Riding the Wave of the Universe

To live is to let go, and in order to live fully we must learn to let go fully and to embrace the flow that is the universe.

—Bodhipaksa, “What You’re Made Of”

Via Daily Dharma: Shared Happiness Is True Happiness

Happiness is not happiness unless it is shared. For happiness is the one thing in all the world that comes to us only at the moment we give it, and is likewise increased by being given away.

—Clark Strand, “The Wisdom Of Frogs”

Via Daily Dharma: The Journey to Meaning

If we wish to live well in the world, not just amble along through life without any examination of our being, then we must engage in the effort to find meaning in our lives.

—Eido Frances Carney, “The Way of Ryokan”

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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