Via Daily Dharma: How to Be Your Brightest Self

What is the light? You are the light, with your ability to be conscious and mindful, and to act with wisdom and foresight. To serve the light means to show up—by which I mean, to be present—for yourself, as your best and highest self, and to show up for others in your life as well.

—Dawa Tarchin Phillips, “What to Do When You Don’t Know What’s Next”

Via Daily Dharma: Plant Yourself in Your Surroundings

Taking refuge is not some kind of evasion or escape, but is the planting of our “selves” deeply in the nature of what surrounds us. We lodge ourselves in the deep waves and in the shallow pools, in the crests and depressions of our lives. Sometimes, even wreckage can make a temporary resting place.

—Gary Thorp, “Shelter from the Storm”

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Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - July 31, 2019 💌

The final awakening is the embracing of the darkness into the light. That means embracing our humanity as well as our divinity. We go from being born into our humanity, to sleep walking for a long time, until we finally awaken and begin to taste our divinity. And then want to finally get free.

We see that as long as we grab at our divinity and push away our humanity we aren’t free. If you want to be free, you can’t push away anything. You have to embrace it all. It’s all God.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Delight in Unexpected Joys

Joy seems to come unbidden, just erupting at the oddest times. It isn’t possible to plan for joy, yet when it comes, it is an unmistakable overflowing of feelings of delight in the world and its mysteries.

—Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara, “Simple Joy”

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Via MyGWork: How LGBT+ Employees Can Prepare for Overseas Work Assignments

In more than half the world LGBT+ people are not protected from discrimination by workplace laws. 70 countries still criminalise homosexuality – 10 with the death penalty – while only 28 recognise same-sex marriage. If you work for a multinational corporation and are given the opportunity for an overseas assignment or relocation these are unfortunately some of the considerations you will have to have if you are LGBT+. Will this new country be safe for me? Will my partner be able to obtain a spousal visa? Will I be protected from discrimination? Will I be lonely or ostracised because of my LGBT+ identity? 

Some of the most common regions large companies send their employees to are less than favourable to LGBT+ people. In Hong Kong 75 percent of gay people are closeted at work, in Singapore it’s 72 percent, in Russia that number jumps to 80 percent.

International assignments are only becoming more common in the corporate world. They have increased by more than 25 percent since the year 2000 and are expected to increase to 50 percent by next year. It is now commonplace that as part of your career you will be sent overseas. Moving between countries with vastly different legal and social systems is part of our increasingly globalised world. It can promote fantastic new business and personal opportunities, and LGBT+ people should not be left behind.

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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”