Via Daily Dharma: Breaking the Cycle

Meditation interrupts the endless feedback loops between consciousness and language, between consciousness and being . . . opening a space, a pause, a higher order function of attentive compassion. In practice, one learns to accept finitude, mortality, and the great ending, and in practice, one learns to cultivate the patience, compassion, and peace that lead to freedom.

—Roy Scranton, “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - October 14, 2018

The interesting question is, "How do you put yourself in a position so that you can allow ‘what is’ to be?" The enemy turns out to be the creation of mind, because when you are just in the moment, doing what you are doing, there is no fear. The fear is when you stand back to think about it. The fear is not in the actions. The fear is in the thought about the actions.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Thoughts Aren’t the Enemy

Most people think that thoughts and emotions are the enemy of present-moment awareness, and that negative emotions in particular are the enemy of interconnectedness. But we can use thoughts and emotions, even the bad ones, to actually bring us into the present moment.

—Phakchok Rinpoche and Erric Solomon, “Creating a Confident Mind”

Via Daily Dharma: Savor Your Life

As you grow in mindfulness, you reclaim your life.

—Thich Nhat Hanh, “Thich Nhat Hanh’s Little Peugeot”

Via Daily Dharma: Wisdom Within the World

Sages, too, endure the same mundane circumstances as we—they fall sick, suffer injuries, meet with unwelcome changes—but their wisdom sees past the incidental to the universal, to the certainty of change that is best coped with by equanimity. Wisdom does not alter the world; it lets the sage transcend the world.

—Bhikkhu Nyanasobhano, “The Phone Rings”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - October 10, 2018

A lot of people try to counteract the ‘I am not good enough’ with ‘I am good enough.’ In other words, they take the opposite and they try to invest it. That still keeps the world at the level of polarities. The art is to go behind the polarities. So the act is to go not to the world of ‘I am good’ to counteract ‘I am bad,’ or ‘I am lovable’ as opposed to ‘I am unlovable.’ But go behind it to ‘I am.’ I am. I am. And I am includes the fact that I do crappy things and I do beautiful things and I am. That includes everything and I am.

- Ram Dass -

The four immeasurables

Os quatro incomensuráveis - bondade amorosa, compaixão, alegria pela fortuna dos outros e equanimidade (The four immeasurables—loving kindness, compassion, rejoicing for others’ fortune, and equanimity) 

—Interview with Edward Simon by Gabriel Lefferts, “This Buddhist Life: Edward Simon”

Via Daily Dharma: Foundations First

If you want to be better at what you do—no matter what that may be—you want to start by being a better human being.

—Interview with Edward Simon by Gabriel Lefferts, “This Buddhist Life: Edward Simon”

Via Daily Dharma: Observe the Breath

When we truly observe the breath, we are automatically placed in the present. We are pulled out of the morass of mental images and into a bare experience of the here-and-now.

—Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, “Breathing”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - October 7, 2018

When you are experiencing fear, you are caught in your separateness. When you are experiencing love, you are caught in your unity with all things. Love, the verb love, is a vehicle of permeating boundaries. You feel the quality of love which means a flow of energy or merging with the universe around you. That one is obviously the antidote for fear. It´s going to the place behind your own separateness.

- Ram Dass -

META pra Brasil!

Que todos os seres encontrem a felicidade e as causas da felicidade.
Que todos os seres se libertem do sofrimento e das causas do sofrimento.
Que todos os seres encontrem a felicidade livre de sofrimento.
Que todos os seres vivam em equanimidade livres de paixões, de agressões e de preconceitos!

- Buda -

May all beings find happiness and the causes of happiness.
May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
May all beings find happiness free from suffering.
May all beings live in equanimity free from passions, aggressions and prejudices!

- Buddha -

Via Daily Dharma: Finding Freedom

What is freedom? It is nothing more, and nothing less, than life lived awake.

—Ken McLeod, “Forget Happiness”

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”