Via Daily Dharma: Seeing America Through the Dharma’s Lens

America is a nation that is always dynamically evolving—a nation of becoming, its composition and character constantly transformed by migrations from many corners of the world, its promise made manifest not by an assertion of a singular or supremacist racial and religious identity, but by the recognition of the interconnected realities of a complex of peoples, cultures, and religions that enrich everyone.

—Duncan Ryuken Williams, “Thus Have I Heard: An American Sutra”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - July 3, 2019 💌

When you stand back far enough, all of your life experiences, independent of what they are, are all learning experiences. From a human point of view, you do your best to optimize pleasure, happiness, all the nice things in life. From your soul’s point of view you take what comes down the pike. So from the soul’s perspective, you work to get what you want and then if you don’t ‘ah, so, I’ll work with what I’ve got.’ 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: An Ever-Changing Landscape

Our hearts and minds change from moment to moment, just as the clouds shift in the evening sky as the sun goes down. Who are we to think we have grasped the true nature of our souls?

—Abbess Fushimi, “Shedding Light”

Via Tricycle: Tonglen: Sending out happiness and taking in suffering

Tonglen is a form of Buddhist practice from the “mind-training” (lojong) teachings given by the important 11th-century Indian master Atisha. An essential part of mind training is overcoming what’s referred to as “self-cherishing,” which in this context means clinging to a narrow, egotistical mindset. 

Tonglen is one of the tools mind training offers to weaken our tendency to self-cherish. Literally “sending and taking,” tonglen refers to visualizing oneself breathing in (taking) the suffering of beings, then breathing out (sending) one’s own well-being to alleviate that suffering.  

The simplest version of tonglen consists of first taking a moment to rest in the natural spaciousness of the mind, or to ground and settle yourself. You then picture the suffering in the world—you can also home in on a certain person in need or a certain circumstance—and breathe it into yourself in the form of thick, heavy black smoke that dissolves in your heart. Opening your heart to feelings of compassion, you then breathe out the suffering in the form of “white energy,” bringing goodness to those afflicted. 

You can practice tonglen formally in this way; however, many find tonglen challenging, so it’s best to practice under the guidance of a teacher. You can also, as the American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön suggests, practice “on the spot” when you are confronted with challenges in everyday life or are dealing with strong negative emotions.

Check out Pema Chödrön’s advice for practicing tonglen outside the meditation hall.

Make the jump here to read the original and more

The Long Road To Pride

Via Daily Dharma: All-Pervasive Awakening

[Meditation] has nothing to do with training in some sort of technical skill or gaining crucial esoteric knowledge that cannot be attained any other way. Nor has it anything to do with transcending the human condition. It is about bringing forth positive qualities in us that will see us living meaningful and dignified human lives.

—Winton Higgins, “Treading the Path with Care”

Via Daily Dharma: Staying Anchored in the Wind

Equanimity is said to be an anchor. It protects you against the “worldly winds”—pleasure and pain, praise and blame, gain and loss, and fame and disrepute—by keeping you anchored so you’re not tossed about by those winds.

—Daisy Hernández, “The Noble Abode of Equanimity”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - June 30, 2019 💌

One of the big traps we have in the West is our intelligence, because we want to know that we know. Freedom allows you to be wise, but you cannot know wisdom. You must be wisdom.
When my guru wanted to put me down, he called me ‘clever.’ When he wanted to reward me, he would call me ‘simple.’
The intellect is a beautiful servant, but a terrible master. Intellect is the power tool of our separateness. The intuitive, compassionate heart is the doorway to our unity. 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Radiating Love and Acceptance

As we transform our own experience and relationship to our realities, we cannot help but affect those around us in radiating circles into the larger culture. These moments of freedom and transformation begin to change and elevate the consciousness and awareness of the world.

—Interview with Larry Yang, “Meditation Teacher Larry Yang Named Grand Marshal in S.F. Pride”

Via Lions Roar: Buddhism’s Call to Action

Buddhism’s Call to Action

Jack Kornfield on the importance of contributing to activism with Buddhist practice and wisdom.

How can you do this service work in the spirit of practice? As dharma practitioners, the first task is to make your own heart a zone of peace. Instead of becoming entangled in the pain or cynicism that exists externally, you need to face your own fear, your own sufferings, and transform them into compassion. Only then can you offer genuine help to the outside world.   Make the jump here to read the full article and more

Via Daily Dharma: The True Journey

All pilgrimages are internal.

—Gail Gutradt, “A Pilgrimage Among Friends”

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Via Daily Dharma: Lose Your Self

Anger is considered a poison when it’s self-motivated and self-centered. But take that attachment to the self out of anger and the same emotion becomes the fierce energy of determination, which is a very positive force … Drop the self-orientation from ignorance, and it becomes a state of unknowing that allows new things to rise.

—Roshi Bernie Glassman and Rick Fields, “Instructions to the Cook”

A Look At The Activism That Came Before Stonewall And The Movement That Came Out Of It

Via Daily Dharma: What Exists?

When we meditate, we relate to that unsettling, ineffable commodity: the present. We train in letting go of thoughts and feelings as they arise, and settle back into the present: that gap between two concepts—past and future—that don’t actually exist.

—Pamela Gayle White, “The Pursuit of Happiness”

Via Daily Dharma: On Finding Each Other

We humans have a way of touching each other’s lives deeply even despite ourselves. In finding our way to each other, we find what is, after all, already there, waiting to be found, wanting to be found.

—Andrew Cooper, “Life’s Hidden Support”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - June 26, 2019 💌

Most of the beings that we call gurus are really teachers. The likelihood of finding somebody that’s a cooked goose is reasonably slim. Since they are not cooked geese, they have their own karma, they have their own stuff. So they become somebody through whom a teaching comes, but them themselves are not truth… If there is a purity in your heart in the way you see truth, you separate this purity of their message from the stuff of their karma. You take the truth and you work with it.

- Ram Dass -

Kings Of Leon - Around The World (Official Music Video)