Via Daily Dharma: A Light Touch

Discovering emptiness brings a lightness of heart, flexibility, and an ease that rests in all things. The more solidly we grasp our identity, the more solid our problems become.

—Jack Kornfield, “No Self or True Self?”

Via Tricycle: RAIN - Getting started on a spiritual path takes guts.

R stands for recognizing what is happening in this moment. Someone just walked too close to you on the sidewalk or didn’t give you what you feel is your “right of way,” and boom, you’re angry. The “R” is simply to notice what is happening, to be present enough to know that something is happening. This is not a small thing. Many people are immediately reactive—and worse, they blame the other person for causing their reaction. The point is to be awake, to pay attention.

A stands for accepting. This does not mean that you wanted what just happened to happen. It simply means that you acknowledge that it did. You name it: for example, “anger is here.” The idea is that although you are not going to indulge the emotion or thought with further thinking or righteousness or another emotion, neither do you resist or avert or distract yourself from what’s happening. You simply acknowledge and name what is happening. You are willing to be open to whatever it is.

I stands for investigating the sensations in the body. This step is primarily a physical noticing. What does anger feel like? The heart beats faster, there can be a flush of energy and heat and a tightening of certain muscles. These physical events are what we label as “anger.” This energetic emotional component has to be willingly and thoroughly felt until the body returns to open relaxation. You breathe and wait and breathe and feel the body, at first tight and then slowly changing, relaxing and opening, letting go. If this is not thoroughly done, then we haven’t really felt the emotion that was triggered by the initial thought, and that energy gets stuck in the body and adds to the conditioned structure that was triggered in the first place. This openness to the physical event is what integrates the energy, dissipates it, and—if it is practiced over and over— eventually dissolves that particular egoic structure, which has no concrete core. The realization that the egoic system will eventually dissolve if we don’t add more thought or energy to it is a wonderful one when first experienced, and a real taste of the potential freedom to come if we continue with practice.

N stands for not identifying. There’s no need to identify a “me’” in what just happened. It was just a passing mental and emotional event, like watching a scene in a movie or the clouds as they move through the sky. We don’t have to build and rebuild a “me” on the passing content of the body-mind. Instead, we can stand as the observer. This not-identifying is tricky, but when the first change of identity shifts from the content of mind to the observer, we can see that the content is not who we are. This is the first real shift of freedom. Eventually identification as “the observer” drops away as well, but to simply make the shift is a good place to start.

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Via Daily Dharma: Starve the Negative, Feed the Positive

By gently robbing negative emotional patterns of their power and by practicing positive modes of thought and action, we bring balance to our inner lives, and our minds will gradually become habituated to remaining calm, stable, and clear.

—Lawrence Levy, “Balancing Emotions”

Via Jack Donovan / MASCULINITY AND HOMOSEXUALITY

The problem is that homosexuality and effeminacy are virtually synonymous in the modern public’s mind. All men who love men are stigmatized as being intrinsically effeminate. Men who engage in homosexual sex are expected to embrace gay culture and are believed, especially by other homosexuals, to be ‘girls on the inside’—no matter how they look and behave, or what their interests may be. As I mentioned above, a sense of manhood is important to most men. Yet, simply by acknowledging same-sex desire, men are expected to relinquish their manhood. They must submit to psychological castration.

While this may seem like no great loss to effeminate men who never put much stock in manhood, what of those who do hold masculinity in high regard? What of those androphiles who love men and love being men, for whom masculinity is a thing of beauty and value? I don’t love men because I see myself as girlish; I love men because I’ve developed a deep-seated appreciation for men and for masculinity itself. Men fascinate and inspire me. I love them in their finest moments, but also in the midst of struggle. 

Just watching men is a pleasure; I see in them innumerable qualities that women often fail to appreciate. I appreciate these things precisely because I am a man, because their masculinity is a reflection of my own. And yet, for this, in some perverse twist of reason, I must give up my own manhood? For this, I am regarded as effeminate and expected to entertain myself with girly things? 

Fuck that.  

- Jack Donovan

Via Daily Dharma: Releasing Fear

Being free of fear is not a matter of never feeling it, but of not being flattened when we do. We can feel it and know it is a natural phenomenon, also an impermanent one, which will have its say and be gone.

—David Guy, “Trying to Speak: A Personal History of Stage Fright”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - March 27, 2019 💌

As you get more conscious, every act you perform increases the amount of consciousness in the universe, because the act itself conveys the consciousness. In other words, I could tell you the greatest truths of the world but if I don’t understand them inside myself, forget it - because I’m not giving you the key that allows you to use it, which is the “faith” in it, which I can only convey through my own success in whatever I’m doing. 

- Ram Dass -

Via Kick the Ick / FB: We have been here a long, long time

Via spirituallyminded

We don’t need to do anything at all. Just allow yourself to be seated; let the sitting take place. If you don’t strive to sit, relaxation will come. And you know something? When there is relaxation, healing begins to take place. There is no healing without relaxation. Relaxation means doing nothing, not trying.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Via Daily Dharma: Love Without Reason

Generosity might be strategically effective or virtuous, but that’s not important. The point is that there is no good reason to love life or each other, yet we do.

—John Tarrant, “The Erotic Life of Emptiness”

Via Daily Dharma: What We All Want

Human beings—rich or poor, East or West, educated or uneducated, man or woman—all have one thing in common: we all want joy and happiness in our life.

— Interview with Lobsang Phuntsok by Andrew Hinton, “The Uninvited Guest of this Universe”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - March 24, 2019 💌

It's very hard to grow, because it's difficult to let go of the models of ourselves in which we've invested so heavily.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Courage to Seek the Truth

Getting started on a spiritual path takes guts. We usually don’t know it in the beginning, but if we keep going on it—if we really want to know the truth of what it means to be human or if we are deeply finished with our suffering—we will learn that walking the path of freedom takes a humble courage.

—Teah Strozer, “RAIN”

Via Daily Dharma: Spaciousness of Mind

Simply imagine that everything is just like the vast, open sky, like empty space, and let your mind blend into the space so that it becomes just as vast and open.

—Phakchok Rinpoche, “Creating Space”

Via Daily Dharma: Taking Mindfulness Online

In spite of the ways in which technology can lure us into delusion, paying close attention to the mental and physical sensations that arise when using social media can be an effective way to avoid becoming either overly attached or defensive regarding one’s virtual self.

— Chris Towery, “Social Media Dharma”

Via FB

Via Daily Dharma: What’s Under the Darkness

Inner light is unceasing—forever luminous and clear. Even in the darkest of circumstances, you can trust that it is always there.

—Tenzin Wangyal, “The Light Is Always There”

From the Church I was raised in in Oregon this

All Are Welcome

Young, old, poor, inked, weak, rich, pierced, tourist, local, sick, seeker, powerful, doubter, brown skin, black skin, white skin any color skin, married, single, gay, straight, healthy, transgender, male, female…… you get the point. You are welcome here!

Church is community. Church is family. 

Join us as we continue to become this church.

We invite you to walk with us as we follow Jesus on a journey of love.

Make the jump here

Via Daily Dharma: Get Out of the Rut

It is only when accustomed routines are infused by vision that they become springboards to discovery rather than deadening ruts.

—Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi, “Vision and Routine”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - March 20, 2019 💌

Krishna, Christ, Hanuman - all of them are the same. The ocean made manifest in different forms. Different strokes for different folks. Each a form we need, if we need form. 

- Ram Dass -