Via Daily Dharma: Your Practice Is Always Present

We are not separate from our practice, and so no matter what, our practice is present.

—Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, “Like a Dragon in Water”

Geopolitical and Personal Nonkilling Choices in Times of Collapse by Manuel Casal Lodeiro

Presentation by Manuel Casal Lodeiro (Instituto Resiliencia and Centro de Saberes para a Sustentabilidade) at Åbo Akademi University in Vasa during the Fifth international “Explorations in Peace & Conflict Research” conference on March 13, 2020 focusing on the topic “Nonkilling Responses to Climate Crisis”. Co-organized by the Center for Global Nonkilling and the Programme in Peace, Mediation and Conflict Research at Åbo Akademi University.

Via Daily Dharma: How Mindfulness Leads to Autonomy

Mindfulness is not only about paying attention and being aware but also about deciding where we want to put our attention.

—Interview with Gina Biegel by Wendy Joan Biddlecombe Agsar, “How to Support Your Teen’s Meditation Practice”

Via Daily Dharma: How to Cultivate Relationships with Obstacles

When challenges or obstacles arise for us, we don’t have to get so intimidated; we can say, “Yes, it’s an obstacle, but it is not intrinsically bad; it’s not going to destroy me.” To create a relationship with the obstacle, learn about it, and finally overcome it … gives us a chance to cultivate wisdom and skillful means.

—Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, “Old Relationships, New Possibilities”

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation / Words of Wisdom - March 11, 2020 💌

Until you can allow your own beauty, your own dignity, your own being, you cannot free another; so if I were giving one instruction, I would say: Work on yourself, have compassion for yourself, allow yourself to be beautiful and all the rest will follow.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Becoming Free from Thoughts

If you know a view as a view, you can be free of that view. If you know a thought as a thought, you can be free of that thought.

—Norman Fischer, “Beyond Language”

Via Daily Dharma: Meaning Is Relative

Meaning is relative and always in flux, part of a chain of reference that never comes to an end.

—David Loy, “The Dharma of Deconstruction”

Via Daily Dharma: Working with Anger

We can try, in a spirit of simple curiosity, to get so close to our anger that we no longer know or feel it as anger. Cause and object, the self being angry, and the anger itself all drop away, and all that remains is the precious energy, freed at last.

—Roshi Nancy Mujo Baker, “Precious Energy”

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation / Words of Wisdom - March 8, 2020 💌

First rule: listen to your inner voice.
Second rule: be honest with yourself.
The predicament is that you listen to your inner voice, and it leads you to a path, and then you outgrow it. And you don't want to admit that you've outgrown it because you've made a big investment in it. But you must be willing to let go, to stand as naked as a newborn child, again and again, and again.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Take Destiny into Your Own Hands

The events and circumstances of our lives do not happen by accident; rather they are the result of certain causes and conditions. When we understand the conditions necessary for something to happen, we can begin to take destiny into our own hands.

—Joseph Goldstein, “The Evolution of Happiness”

Via White Crane Institute / Gay Wisdom: GLENN GREENWALD

Glenn Greenwald

1967 -

GLENN GREENWALD is an American lawyer, journalist and author born on this date. He was a columnist for Guardian US from August 2012 to October 2013. He was a columnist for Salon.com from 2007 to 2012, and an occasional contributor to The Guardian. Greenwald worked as a constitutional and civil rights litigator.

At Salon he contributed as a columnist and blogger, focusing on political and legal topics. He has also contributed to other newspapers and political news magazines, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The American Conservative, The National Interest and In These Times. In 2014 he became, along with Laura Poitrasand and Jeremy Scahill, one of the founding editors of The Intercept.

Greenwald was named by Foreign  Policy Magazine as one of the "Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013" and The Advocate named him as one of the "50 Most Influential LGBT Persons in 2014".

Four of the five books he has written have been on The New York Times Best Sellers list. Greenwald is a frequent speaker on college campuses, including Harvard Law, Yale Law, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, UCLA School of Law and the University of Wisconsin. He frequently appears on various radio and television programs.

In June 2013 Greenwald became widely known after The Guardian published the first of a series of reports detailing United States and British global surveillance programs, based on classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden. The series on which Greenwald worked, along with others, won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

His reporting on the National Security Agency (NSA) won numerous other awards around the world, including top investigative journalism prizes from the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting, the 2013 Online Journalism Awards, the Esso Award for Excellence in Reporting in Brazil for his articles in O Globo on NSA mass surveillance of Brazilians (becoming the first foreigner to win the award), the 2013 Libertad de Expresion Internacional award from Argentinian magazine  Perfil, and the 2013 Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Greenwald lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the hometown of his partner, David Michael Miranda. Greenwald has said his residence in Brazil was the result of an American law, the Defense of Marriage Act, barring federal recognition of same-sex marriages, which prevented his partner from receiving a visa to reside in the United States with him.

Via Daily Dharma: Paying Attention Changes the World

Attention changes what kind of a thing comes into being for us: in that way it changes the world.

—Iain McGilchrist, “Examining Attention”

Via Daily Dharma: Paying Attention Changes the World

Attention changes what kind of a thing comes into being for us: in that way it changes the world.

—Iain McGilchrist, “Examining Attention”

Via Daily Dharma: What Makes an Enlightened Life?

If I had to summarize the entirety of an enlightened
person’s life in a few words,
it would be complete acceptance of what is.
As we accept what is, our minds are relaxed
and composed
while the world changes rapidly around us.

—Haemin Sunim, “The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down”

Via Daily Dharma: Interconnection All Around Us

When we just say, “I am,” and open our eyes around us, we intuitively see that others are also included in “I am.”

—Ruben L. F. Habito, “Be Still & Know”

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation / Words of Wisdom - March 4, 2020 💌

There is a being on another plane that guides, protects, and helps you. That loves you so incredibly. Does your sense of unworthiness prevent you from being loved as much as this being loves you? Unworthiness has to go. You have to be able to say, "Christ, God, Baba, let me feel your love. Let me fill up with your love, let me be absorbed into your love."

Breathe in and out of your heart; with each in-breath, you take in that love a little more. With each out-breath, you get rid of that which keeps you from acknowledging that you are love.

- Ram Dass -

ANY DEM WILL DO! - A Randy Rainbow Song Parody

Via LionsRoar / Steadfast in the Midst of Samsara

Self-Immolation,” 2012 by Tashi Norbu. www.tashinorbu.com

Shinshu Roberts examines the suffering inherent in the bodhisattva path, what Dogen referred to as being “the blue lotus in the flame.” From the Spring 2020 issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly.

In 1243, Eihei Dogen, the thirteenth-century founder of Soto Zen in Japan, wrote in his evocative Kuge (“Flowers of Emptiness”) that “the time and place that the blue lotus flowers open and spread are in the midst of fire and in the time of fire” (Gudo Nishijima and Chodo Cross, Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo). Dogen lived in a time of political uncertainty, violent weather, and cultural change. Perhaps these difficulties inspired Dogen to take up the poetic image of a blue lotus—associated with practice–realization—blooming within the fire of samsara.

Make the jump here to read the full article and more

 

Via Daily Dharma: Making Space to Respond with Intention

If we cultivate awareness enough to step back a bit from simply reacting, we can insert a gap or a pause before being carried away. In that little gap there is the freedom to respond in a fresh way, less predetermined.

—Judy Lief, “Train Your Mind: Don’t Be So Predictable”