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Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - March 10, 2021 💌

 

Love can open the way to surrendering into oneness. It gets extraordinarily beautiful when there’s no more “me” and “you,” and it becomes just “us.” Taken to a deeper level, when compassion is fully developed, you are not looking at others as “them.” You’re listening and experiencing and letting that intuitive part of you merge with the other person, and you’re feeling their pain or joy or hope or fear in yourself. Then it’s no longer “us” and “them”; it’s just “us.” Practice this in your relationships with others. 

At a certain point, you realize that you see only the projections of your own mind. The play of phenomena is a projection of the spirit. The projections are your karma, your curriculum for this incarnation.  

Everything that’s happening to you is a teaching designed to burn out your stuff, your attachments. Your humanity and all your desires are not some kind of error. They’re integral parts of the journey.

- Ram Dass -

Flowering Lotus Meditation

OUR MISSION

The Mission of Flowering Lotus Meditation is to create and promote a variety of accessible opportunities for meditation practice in a non-denominational setting. All retreats and other events are based on Buddhist teachings of mindfulness and compassion and welcome students from diverse backgrounds.

https://www.floweringlotusmeditation.org/

 

The Lightness of Breathing By Valerie Brown

The Buddha once instructed, “Make of yourself a light.” When you’re feeling low, this breathwork practice can help you connect with your inner light.    The practice can be done in four parts: Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in. Breathing out, I know that I am breathing out. Breathing in, I follow the in breath all the way. Breathing out, I follow the out breath all the way.  Breathing in, I am aware of my body. Breathing out, I recognize that I have a body, and I am so grateful. Breathing in, I recognize tension in my body. Breathing out, I release tension, calming my body.

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Via Daily Dharma: Just Experience What Arises

 There is an exquisite quality that comes from just experiencing what arises, completely, with no separation between awareness and experience.

—Ken McLeod, “Forget Happiness”

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Via White Crane Insitute // Noteworthy - ACT UP

1987 -

ACT UP was formed on this date, thirty-four years ago, at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York. The writer Vito Russo wrote at the time that "living with AIDS in this country is like living through a war that's happening only for those people in the trenches. Every time a shell explodes you look around to discover that you've lost more of your friends.  But nobody else notices, it isn't happening to them."  Larry Kramer had been asked to speak at the Lesbian and Gay Community Center as part of a rotating speaker series, and his well-attended speech focused on action to fight AIDS. Kramer spoke out against the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), which he perceived as politically impotent. Kramer had actually co-founded the GMHC but had resigned from its board of directors in 1983. According to Douglas Crimp, Kramer posed a question to the audience: "Do we want to start a new organization devoted to political action?" The answer was "a resounding yes." Approximately 300 people met two days later to form ACT UP.

They became confrontational about the government's complete lack of urgency towards the plight of the thousands of Gay men dying of AIDS.  That was the face of AIDS at the time and no one seemed to care that so many were dying.  And many were actively blocking (as many still do) the use of condoms for AIDS prevention. They called out Ronald Reagan and Cardinal O'Connor and Pope John Paul for their responsibility in the deaths of millions while they prevented treatment and prevention.  Because of ACT UP, political leaders and the media were forced to pay attention to what was happening.  Because of ACT UP things moved for the care and treatment of people living and dying with AIDS.

Anthony Fauci was one of the main targets. On the passing of Larry Kramer last year, Fauci write an appreciation of his friend, "Back then, I was the scientist leading the AIDS effort at the National Institutes of Health. To him, I was the face of the federal government. He decided the best way to bring attention to all of this was to come out and attack me — which he did publicly and in a somewhat vicious manner. He wrote an article I laugh about now, but it was on the front page of the magazine section of the San Francisco Examiner: an open letter to an incompetent idiot Dr. Anthony Fauci. He called me a murderer for being negligent about HIV. That shocked me a bit, but it got me to think that I needed to know a little more about this guy. So I reached out — and over the years we went from acquaintances who were adversarial to acquaintances who were less adversarial to friends to very, very dear friends."

The work is not finished and the ACT-UP model is one that has been replicated by many dealing with entrenched hostility and animus.

MR. BIDEN (Bring My Vaccine) - A Randy Rainbow Song Parody

Tina Turner - Sarvesham Svastir Bhavatu (Peace Mantra)

Via Daily Dharma: Accept Not-Knowing

 Equanimity is a radical acceptance of not-knowing and a means of not taking everything so personally.

—Christopher Willard, “How Parents and Children Can Learn Balance and Equanimity from the Eight Worldly Winds”

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Via Daily Dharma: Benefitting All Beings

 Walking the bodhisattva path—dedicating one’s life to the benefit of all beings—includes doing whatever we can to help ourselves be happy and free.

—Cyndi Lee, “May I Be Happy”

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Via Daily Dharma: Be Absorbed by Stillness

 In those moments when one is truly absorbed and taken up in the stillness, you can see clearly what is important in life.

—Interview with Ruben Habito by Emma Varvaloucas, “Love at First Sit”

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VIa Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - March 7, 2021 💌

 

It seems that we string moments together where we feel deeply connected, and then a moment later it’s a new moment, but we only want to cling to the previous experience.

I invite you not to cling. I invite you to open to the next moment and allow it to have its own richness. Nothing will kill the glow faster than clinging.

I was with Aldous Huxley years ago, and I didn’t know him well, but when we were together there were just a few words he kept using: “Extraordinary,” “How curious,” and “How odd.” I realized that everything in life is extraordinary if I just want to look.

It’s true there’s nothing new under the sun, and yet it’s all fresh.

- Ram Dass -

Via L.A.Times

 

Via White Crane Institute // 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 The Upworthiest

 

In a beautiful act of defiance, BYU's LGBT students lit up 'Y Mountain' in rainbow colors

The dark mountains that overlook Provo, Utah were illuminated by a beautiful rainbow-colored "Y" on Thursday night just before 8 pm. The 380-foot-tall "Y" overlooks the campus of Brigham Young University, a private college owned by the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), commonly known as Mormons.

The display was planned by a group of around 40 LGBT students to mark the one-year anniversary of the university sending out a letter clarifying its stance on homosexual behavior.

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EastSiders: The Documentary

Via Daily Dharma: Growth Takes Time

 It’s OK if the practice doesn’t work in exactly the way you expect. Sometimes the fruit comes later.

—Interview with Brother Fulfillment by Matt Gesicki, “The Sangha Without Thich Nhat Hanh”

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