Thursday, February 4, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Finding Strength Among Discomfort
When
life presents us with challenges, we can get stuck in the mud—in our
habitual reactions and patterns—or we can be present to the suffering
and find compassion and strength within the discomfort, blossoming like
the lotus.
—Carolyn Gregoire, “Buddhist Thank-You Cards”
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Wednesday, February 3, 2021
Via Tricycle // How to Work with Anxiety on the Path of Liberation
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| How to Work with Anxiety on the Path of Liberation | ||
| Anxiety
is actually a necessary part of our path. Psychotherapist Bruce Tift
gives an instruction in how to relate to it constructively. |
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Via White Crane Insitute
NATHAN LANE, (nee Joseph Lane) American actor, born; a Tony Award- and Emmy Award-winning actor of the stage and screen. When he was 21 and told his mother he was gay, her reply was: "I'd rather you were dead." Lane shot back: "I knew you'd understand". His professional association with his close friend the playwright Terrence McNally includes roles in Lips Together, Teeth Apart, The Lisbon Traviata [Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Awards], Bad Habits, Love! Valor! Compassion! [Obie, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards ], and Dedication.
Lane, who came out publicly after the death of Matthew Shepard, jokingly describes himself as "one of those old-fashioned homosexuals, not one of the newfangled ones who are born joining parades." When he was asked once by a reporter whether he was Gay, rather than providing a blunt yes-or-no answer, he famously declared, "I'm 40, single and I work a lot in the musical theatre. You do the math."
He has been a long-time board member of and fundraiser for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids, and he has been honored by The Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, and The Trevor Project for his work in the gay community. Lane lives in New York, and on November 17, 2015, married his long-time partner, theater producer and writer Devlin Elliott.
Via Tricycle // Thich Nhat Hanh in Paris
Thich Nhat Hanh in Paris
By Fred Eppsteiner
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Via Daily Dharma: Generate Gentleness
Meditation
is not necessarily about generating intense concentration. It can be
about the exact opposite: a slow, steady gentleness that adds no
intensity to what already exists.
—M. Sophia Newman, "Straight Outta Kapilavastu"
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Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - February 3, 2021 💌
"When somebody provokes your anger, the only reason you get angry is because you’re holding on to how you think something is supposed to be. You’re denying how it is. Then you see it’s the expectations of your own mind that are creating your own hell. When you get frustrated because something isn’t the way you thought it would be, examine the way you thought, not just the thing that frustrates you. You’ll see that a lot of your emotional suffering is created by your models of how you think the universe should be and your inability to allow it to be as it is."
- Ram Dass -
Tuesday, February 2, 2021
Via Tricycle // The Joy of Joy
The Joy of Joy
By Daisy Hernández
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Via Daily Dharma: Give Thanks for Your Community
Meaningful
acts of the individual—our practice included—can take place only in the
context and with the support of a strong community.
—James Shaheen, “Finding Community”
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Monday, February 1, 2021
Via Tricycle // The Best Possible Life
The Best Possible Life
By Seth Segall
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Via Daily Dharma: Breathing as One
May
we carry each other through these dark times through the strength of
our practice, sitting in silence and stillness, breathing as one.
—Brandon Dean Lamson, “Meeting Violence with Kindness”
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Sunday, January 31, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Build the Foundation of Compassion
Generosity is the ground of compassion; it is a prerequisite to the realization of liberation.
—Marcia Rose, “The Gift That Cannot Be Given”
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Via White Crane Institute // HOWARD OVERING STURGIS
HOWARD OVERING STURGIS, the novelist and eccentric was born on this date. A millionaire American expatriate, Sturgis passed his life in England knitting, embroidering and writing novels. He is best known for two: Tim: A Story of Eton and Belchamber. Affable and witty, Sturgis was a favorite with Henry James, Edith Wharton, and A. C. Benson, and the subject of a memorable sketch by E. M. Forster. Sturgis maintained a lifelong relationship with a much younger man, William Haynes-Smith, familiarly known as "the Babe", to whom his novel "Belchamber" is dedicated.
The scion of a wealthy New England family, his parents sent him to be educated at Eton College. He went on to study at Cambridge where he became a friend of the novelists henry James and Edith Wharton.
After the death of his mother in 1888 he moved, with his lover William Haynes-Smith, into a country house named Queen's Acre, near Windsor Great Park. Sturgis's first novel, Tim: A Story of School Life (1891), was published anonymously and was dedicated to the "love that surpasses the love of women." It describes the love of two youths at boarding-school.
He died on February 7, 1920. After his death appreciations of him were published by A.C. Benson, Edith Wharton, E.M. Forster and George Santayana, his cousin.
Via BrainPickings // D.T. Suzuki on What Freedom Really Means and How Zen Can Help Us Cultivate Our Character
D.T. Suzuki on What Freedom Really Means and How Zen Can Help Us Cultivate Our Character
“The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow.”
By Maria Popova
Alan Watts may be credited with popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West, but he owes the entire trajectory of his life and legacy to a single encounter with the Zen Buddhist sage D.T. Suzuki (October 18, 1870–July 12, 1966) — one of humanity’s greatest and most influential stewards of Zen philosophy. At the age of twenty-one, Watts attended a lecture by Suzuki in London, which so enthralled the young man that he spent the remainder of his life studying, propagating, and building upon Suzuki’s teachings. Legendary composer John Cage had a similar encounter with Suzuki, which profoundly shaped his life and music.
In the early 1920s, spurred by the concern that Zen masters are “unable to present their understanding in the light of modern thought,” Suzuki undertook “a tentative experiment to present Zen from our common-sense point of view” — a rather humble formulation of what he actually accomplished, which was nothing less than giving ancient Eastern philosophy a second life in the West and planting the seed for a new culture of secularized spirituality.
But by 1940, all of his books had gone out of print in war-torn England, and all remaining copies in Japan were destroyed in the great fire of 1945, which consumed three quarters of Tokyo. In 1946, Christmas Humphreys, president of London’s Buddhist Society, set out to undo the damage and traveled to Tokyo, where he began working with Suzuki on translating his new manuscripts and reprinting what remained of the old. The result was the timeless classic Essays in Zen Buddhism (public library), originally published in 1927 — a collection of Suzuki’s foundational texts introducing the principles of Zen into secular life as a discipline concerned first and foremost with what he called “the reconstruction of character.” As Suzuki observed, “Our ordinary life only touches the fringe of personality, it does not cause a commotion in the deepest parts of the soul.” His essays became, and remain, a moral toolkit for modern living, delivered through a grounding yet elevating perspective on secular spirituality.