Via Daily Dharma: The Beauty of Impermanence

When we can accept that people and things are always shifting and changing, our hearts can open.

—Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, “The Hunger for Home”

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Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - December 11, 2019 💌

"Having empathy for another means your heart is breaking, because you understand the intensity of their experience, and at the same moment, you are absolutely, equanimously present. You are not clinging to anything, just watching the phenomena of the universe change.

It’s then that your acts can be compassionate. That is where the root of compassion is. The root of compassion is not empathy; that’s along the lines of kindness, and that’s good, but it’s not compassion. The ultimate compassion is the act itself, which has the potential to relieve every level of suffering, not just the food in the belly, or the mattress to safely sleep on at night. The suffering that comes from separateness is only relieved when you are present with another person."

- Ram Dass -

Via White Crane Institute: This Day in Gay History December 10 / Emily Dickinson

EMILY DICKINSON, American poet born (d. 1886); Dickinson is another of those pale, frail, Victorian ladies whose psyches are encased in concrete, generally by their families and later by academicians. To tamper with the official versions of their lives is tantamount to spitting on the flag, with the same dire consequences. Just look at what happened to Rebecca Patterson when she dared to suggest in a biography some years back that Dickinson was a Lesbian in love with her girlhood friend Kate Scott Anthon. She was fried. “What do you mean?” was the cry in the land. “How can Emily Dickinson be a Lesbian? She’s an American.” Although there are some who think that the great poet was, in fact, a Lesbian, the official story remains the same as that innocently told about our Lesbian grammar school teachers: their boyfriends died in World War I so they remained old maids.

 

 

 

LXIV.
A BOOK.
1.

He ate and drank the precious words, His spirit grew robust,
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was dust.
He danced along the dingy days,
And this bequest of wings
Was but a book. What liberty
A loosened spirit brings!

Dickinson, E. (1993). The Collected Works of Emily Dickinson.  New York: Chatham River Press.

 

Via Daily Dharma: Work with What You Have

Until enlightenment, our practice is vulnerable, our meditation and conduct both prone to wobble. Nonetheless, until we do confirm our innate wisdom, we need to work at it as best we can.

—Roshi Bodhin Kjolhede, “Don’t Just Sit There”

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Via Daily Dharma: Appreciate the Precious Present Moment

All things already have their endings within them. If we become attuned to this, then we can appreciate the moment. We can appreciate the extraordinary fact of our unique and precious lives.

—Thanissara, “The Grit That Becomes a Pearl”

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Via CBS: World of Weddings: Same-sex couples in Israel find legal loophole to recognize marriages

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Via Daily Dharma: Noticing What We Can Change Inbox x

When we succumb with grace to the fact that we are, basically, hopeless cases, we have an extraordinary opportunity to discover in what sense we are not hopeless.

—Henry Shukman, “The Art of Being Wrong”

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Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - December 8, 2019 💌

"It's interesting that as long as you identify with your personality, the things that get you uptight are your enemies. The minute you identify with your awareness, then the things that gets you uptight show you where your awareness has still sticky fingers. Most of us with the mind, because your mind deals with polarities, you feel that if you're happy, you're not sad, and you want to be happy. So you push away that which makes you sad.

But if you are going to be free, there's nothing you can turn away from or turn off. Like if you live fully in this moment, does this moment include that baby that's taking its last breath from starvation? Yeah. So are you sad? Yes. Does it include the baby taking its first breath as it comes out of its mother’s womb, and the joy of the beginning? Yes. So you're happy. If you are the fullness of the moment, all of it, these are all your voices. If you and I are to be free, there is nothing we can push away."

-  Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: The Miracle of Awareness

For this is who and what we are: constellations of matter, vulnerable, impermanent, and—for moments? for lifetimes?—illumined by the miracle of awareness. Whether fleeting or eternal, it’s a miracle that we must never take for granted.

—Noelle Oxenhandler, “Awake and Demented”

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Via Gay Buddhist Sangha

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Via Daily Dharma: Observe Without Judgment

In the practice of meditation, we use our nonjudgmental awareness to get in touch with our feelings and what’s going on in our bodies without adding our narratives or dramas to it. We just see what comes up.

—Gerry Shishin Wick, “The Great Heart Way”

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Via Daily Dharma: Enter Your Practice with Ease

Practice isn’t about being intense; it’s about coming back to ease—letting the mind and body settle into an experience that holds the seeds of expansiveness.

—Justin von Bujdoss, “Tilopa’s Six Nails”

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Via Daily Dharma: What Is Personal Transformation?

The path of personal transformation is about deconstructing and reconstructing the self, or, more precisely, the relationship between the self and its world.

—David Loy, “Awakening in the Age of Climate Change”

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Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - December 4, 2019 💌

"When talking about awareness, most of us identify with our awareness through the ego, through the mind and senses. But the true self is in the middle of our chest, in our spiritual heart. So, to get from ego to the true self I said, 'I am loving awareness.' Loving awareness is the soul. I am loving awareness. I am aware of everything, I’m aware of my body and my senses and my mind, I’m aware of all of it, but I notice that I’m loving all of it. I’m loving all of the world."

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Letting Your Desires Pass

The next time you have some wanting or desire in the mind, investigate what the wanting feels like and then notice how it feels when the wanting passes away. Given the great law of impermanence, it always will.

—Joseph Goldstein, “The End of Suffering”

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