Via Daily Dharma: Choose Your Response

 Our emotions aren’t up to us. What we do with them, however, is absolutely up to us.

—Ralph De La Rosa, “What Is Up to Us”

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Via White Crane Institute // CHAVELA VARGAS

 

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Chavela Vargas

1919 -

ISABEL VARGAS LIZANO (d: 2012), better known as CHAVELA VARGAS, was a Costa Rican-born Mexican singer. She was especially known for her rendition of Mexican rancheras, but she is also recognized for her contribution to other genres of popular Latin American music. She has been an influential interpreter in the Americas and Europe, muse to figures such as Pedro Almodovar, hailed for her haunting performances, and called "la voz áspera de la ternura", the rough voice of tenderness.

She is featured in many Almodóvar's films, including La Flor de mi Secreto in both song and video. She has said, however, that acting is not her ambition, although she had previously participated in films such as 1967's La Soldadera. Vargas recently appeared in the 2002 Julie Taymor film Frida, singing "La Llorona" (The Weeping Woman). Her classic "Paloma Negra" (Black Dove) was also included in the soundtrack of the film.

Vargas herself, as a young woman, was alleged to have had an affair with Frida Kahlo, during Kahlo's marriage to muralist Diego Rivera. She also appeared in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Babel, singing "Tú me acostumbraste" (You Got Me Used To), a bolero of Frank Dominguez. Joaquin Sabina’s song "Por el Boulevar de los Sueños Rotos" ("Down the Boulevard of Broken Dreams") is dedicated to Vargas.

Her heavy drinking and raucous life took their toll, and she vanished from public life in the 1970s. Submerged in an alcoholic haze, she said, she was taken in by an Indian family who nursed her back to health without knowing who she was. In 2003, she told The New York Times that she had not had a drink in twenty-five years.

In the early 1990s she began singing again at El Habito, the bohemian Mexico City nightclub. From there her career took off again, with performances in Latin America, Europe and the United States. At 81, she announced that she was a lesbian.

“Nobody taught me to be like this,” she told the Spanish newspaper El País in 2000. “I was born this way. Since I opened my eyes to the world, I have never slept with a man. Never. Just imagine what purity. I have nothing to be ashamed of.”

On the eve of her Carnegie Hall debut in 2003, she looked back on how her singing had changed over her career. “The years take you to a different feeling than when you were 30,” she said in an interview with The Times. “I feel differently, I interpret differently, more toward the mystical.”

On the evening of her death in 2012, instead of holding a traditional Mexican wake, friends, fans and musicians gathered in the evening for a musical tribute at Plaza Garibaldi in Mexico City, where Ms. Vargas had spent many a night drinking with Mr. Jiménez. She would have loved it.

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Via Daily Dharma: Learn to Listen Fully

 In your daily life, notice the positive and negative habits you might have in your approach to listening. What helps you to listen fully and spaciously?

—Martine Batchelor, “Instructions for Listening Meditation”

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Via Daily Dharma: Developing Wisdom

 Wisdom has to do with seeing clearly, seeing things as they are, that is, coming to terms with the way things are.

—Larry Rosenberg, “Death Awareness”

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Via Daily Dharma: Find Your Buddhanature Every Day

We are indeed connected to all things, but we should feel free to move about, free to join others, free to examine preconceptions and misinterpretations, and free to find our buddhanature as we engage in the day’s most common actions and events.

—Gary Thorp, “The Dust Beyond the Cushion”

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Via Lion’s Roar newsletter // Pema Chödrön offers a method for generating love and compassion for all human beings.

Be Free of Suffering

Pema Chödrön offers a method for generating love and compassion for all human beings.

 

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - April 14, 2021 💌

 
 

When you can learn to accept love, you can give love. You can give love to all you perceive, all the time. I am loving awareness. You can be aware of your eyes seeing, your ears hearing, your skin feeling, and your mind producing thoughts, thought after thought after thought.

Thoughts are seductive, but you don’t have to identify with them. You identify not with the thoughts, but with the awareness of the thoughts. To bring loving awareness to everything you turn your awareness to is to be love.

This moment is love.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Create with Your Attention

Through the direction and nature of our attention, we prove ourselves to be partners in creation, both of the world and of ourselves.

—Iain McGilchrist, “Examining Attention”

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Via Daily Dharma: Embrace the Groundlessness

 When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment.

—Pema Chödrön, “The Fundamental Ambiguity of Being Human”

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Via Daily Dharma: Cut Through Your Mind’s Clinging

 To cut through the mind’s clinging, it is important to understand that all appearances are void, like the appearance of water in a mirage. Beautiful forms are of no benefit to the mind, nor can ugly forms harm it in any way.

—Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, “Teachings on the Nature of Mind and Practice”

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Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - April 11, 2021 💌

 

The practice of repeating the phrase "I am loving awareness" turns you inward toward the soul. If you dive deep enough into your soul, you will come to God. In Greek it’s called 'agape', God love. Martin Luther King, Jr. said about this agape, this higher love:

“It’s an overflowing love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless and creative … the love of God operating in the human heart.”

When you can accept that kind of love, you can give that love.

- Ram Dass -

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Via Daily Dharma: Start with a Clean Slate

 Unlike a painting, our minds are not fixed. It is like the image is wiped clean and a new one is created every moment. While the next image will often be very similar to the previous one, it is never exactly the same.

—Khentrul Rinpoche, “A New Mind Each Moment”

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Via FB / Maya Angelou - Ancestral Mathematics

 

Via Tricycle // Engaging with the Truths of Suffering

 

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April 10, 2021

Engaging with the Truths of Suffering
 

 

 

The four noble truths are the very essence of the Buddha’s teachings. Beginning with the radical declaration of the first truth—that everything in our lives is qualified by suffering—they lay out the existence of suffering, its causes, the possibility of its cessation, and the means of its cessation (the eightfold path).

At a time of widespread global suffering, these truths matter more than ever. But their value goes beyond their ability to help us to understand the nature of suffering. They also provide us with a practical set of principles for actively engaging with the reality of suffering in our world.

Soto Zen priest Rev. Keiryu Liên Shutt, a former social worker who spent 10 years working with homeless seniors, has devoted her life to putting the four truths into action. She reminds us that these are truths to be lived by, not just learned or memorized. We can apply and embody them in our everyday lives to actively engage with hardship and injustice.

Watch this new four-part Dharma Talk series to discover Shutt’s reframing of the four noble truths as the four engaged noble truths and to learn how they can enliven us, reconnect us with a sense of wholeness, and inspire real-world engagement.
 

Watch the Dharma Talk now »