Via Daily Dharma: Choose Your Response

One of the finest results of meditation is the increased gap between stimulus and response. That gap before I react gives me time to notice my habitual patterns and sometimes even decide whether to stay a slave to them or break loose.

—Brent R. Oliver, “I Take Refuge in the Humor”

Via Daily Dharma: A World of Compassion

Instead of looking at others, telling yourself your usual story about who people are, visualize every person you see as the Bodhisattva of Compassion, the very embodiment of compassion. Deeply doing this, there’s no way you can feel negative toward them.

—Lama Yeshe, “Visualizations”

Via Tricycle: Happiness is Found Within

Happiness is Found Within

Download Transcript It has been edited for clarity.

 

Today’s divisive political culture can bring out our worst impulses, but with Tibetan Buddhist methods of fostering compassion, we can clear the mind of negativity and connect with our intrinsic qualities of clarity and warmth. Dungse Jampal Norbu, a teacher in the Mangala Shri Bhuti sangha and the son of Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche and Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel, guides us through practices to cool off anger and take a walk in other’s shoes. 

Make the jump here to listen

Via Daily Dharma: Planting Seeds for the Future

In each moment our experience is determined to a great extent by seeds from the past that are bearing fruit right now. In each moment, too, we can plant a seed intentionally that will create fruit in the future.

—Ben Connelly, “Cleaning Out the Storehouse”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - July 28, 2019 💌

Sometimes you experience a quality of dying or emptiness about life. It’s scary because you built your whole game up — you saved all your money to buy a Mercedes-Benz. Then you buy a Mercedes-Benz and after about a week it’s just another car. How can it be just another car when you spent years buying a Mercedes-Benz? There's a real horror when meaningful stuff becoming meaningless — and you are awakening.

-Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: What Happens When We Stay Present During Terrible Times?

The hard truth is, terrible things happen in life that we can’t control, and somehow we do bear them. We bear witness to them. When we do so with the fullness of our bodies, minds, and hearts, often a loving action emerges.

—Frank Ostaseski, “Washing My Boy’s Body”

Via Daily Dharma: A Fundamental Clarity

Fear is not inherent in what is known as main or basic mind. What is inherent? Clear seeing, spaciousness, pure awareness.

—Pilar Jennings, “Fear”

Via Daily Dharma: We’re Already Complete

You and I don’t manifest in the universe as meaning, we manifest as living human beings. We’re not here to represent something else. We’re here in our own right. A human being, or a garden hoe for that matter, is complete in itself.

—Lin Jensen, “Wash Your Bowl”

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

My own strategy is to keep cultivating the witness, that part of me that notices how I’m doing it—cultivate the quiet place in me that watches the process of needing approval, of the smile on the face, of the false humility, of all the horrible creepy little psychological things that are just my humanity. And watching them occur again and again and again. 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Reaching Out to One Another

There is far more love available to us in any given moment than we might be aware. And there is much, much more love in our hearts than we as adults have been conditioned to believe is appropriate to express.

—Kate Johnson, “Making the First Move”

Via Daily Dharma: Dropping Our Facades

To truly connect with other human beings, we must dare to present ourselves in ways that depict the true variety and complexity of our human experience. Without honesty there is no real bond between us, and without connection, nothing else really matters.

—Josh Korda, “Why I Come Clean to Students About My Insomnia, Anxiety, and Sobriety”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - July 21, 2019 💌

At some point awakening begins. The awakening happens with trauma or it happens when somebody you love dies. In sexuality you transcend separateness. It can be drugs, it can be meditation, it can be a hymn, it can be a leaf falling, it can be lying under the stars, it can be trying to solve a problem where your mind gets so one-pointed it goes through the veil. Whatever it is, you open up into other planes of consciousness that have been there in all of the splendor all the time. 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Watch as Obstacles Dissolve

Something remarkable happens when we go on sitting through all the but’s, through all the thoughts, sensations, and emotions that we would so like to oust. Gradually they begin to feel less alien, less like obstacles in the way, rocks in the path. Our deepening awareness becomes a kind of dew, falling on everything equally, allowing everything to sparkle.

—Noelle Oxenhandler, “Ah, But the Breezes…”

Via Daily Dharma: Nothing but the Present Moment

Don’t worry about the future; don’t worry about the past. Stay right here. Ultimately you get so that you can’t say that you’re going forward, you can’t say that you’re going back, you can’t say that you’re staying in place. There’s nothing to be attached to.

—Ajahn Chah, “The Last Gift”

Via Daily Dharma: Karma’s Equanimity

The principle of karmic retribution—cause and effect—works with perfect clarity right before our eyes. Even the smallest, most minor evils are consumed in this fire, burning like dim stars in the night.

—Hakuin, “Black Fire”

Via Daily Dharma: Use Imagination as a Spiritual Tool

If we really want to go beyond the surface of things to the deeply hidden, actual experience of being alive (as spiritual practice encourages us to do), we need imagination as an ally. The senses, reason, even our moral and emotional faculties are not enough.

—Norman Fischer, “Saved from Freezing”

Via Daily Dharma: Making the Most of Samsara

We inhabit a land of deep samskaras, karmic imprints that demand even deeper purification to dissipate. It is also a land where some of us are lucky to possess conditions for practice: sufficient food, good people, serious teachers and students, and, above all, a reason.

—Lisa Kremer, “Sitting in Wartime”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - July 17, 2019 💌

You go from using the spiritual journey in the service of your psychodynamics to using your psychodynamics in the service of your spiritual journey. 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: A Guide to Generosity

Two important things about true giving: First, it requires some sacrifice on the part of the giver. To give away something that one doesn’t need is not dana. Second, the act must not be condescending but must show respect to the one who receives the gift. In fact, one is grateful to the recipient who makes the act of giving possible.

—Taitetsu Unno, “Three Grapefruits”