Sunday, April 18, 2021

Via Daily Dharma: Noticing with Kindness

In meditation, we are invited to not judge what’s going on for us, but rather to be in relationship with whatever is happening with a sense of kindness and commitment. 

—Sebene Selassie, “Meditation Q&A with Sebene Selassie”

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Via 💌 Inbox Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - April 18, 2021


 

Meditation provides a deeper appreciation of the interrelatedness of all things and the part each person plays. The simple rules of this game are honesty with yourself about where you are in your life and learning to listen to hear how it is. Meditation is a way of listening more deeply, so you hear from a deeper space, exactly how it is. Meditation will help you quiet your mind, enhance your ability to be insightful and understanding and give you a sense of inner peace.

If you meditate regularly, even when you don’t feel like it, you will make great gains, for it will allow you to see how your thoughts impose limits on you. Your resistances to meditation are your mental prisons in miniature.

When I asked Maharajji how to meditate, he said, “Meditate like Christ.” I said, “Maharajji, how did Christ meditate?” He became very quiet and closed his eyes. After a few minutes, he had a blissful expression on his face and a tear trickled down his cheek. He opened his eyes and said, “He lost himself in Love.” Try the meditation of losing yourself in love…. 

- Ram Dass -

 

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Saturday, April 17, 2021

Via Lion's Roar // Detox Your Mind: 5 Practices to Purify the 3 Poisons

 

Detox Your Mind: 5 Practices to Purify the 3 Poisons
Five Buddhist teachers share practices to clear away the poisons that cause suffering and obscure your natural enlightenment. Introduction by Lion’s Roar’s editor-in-chief Melvin Mcleod.
I think what makes Buddhism unique — what makes it Buddhism — is its diagnosis of what causes suffering, which is called the second noble truth.

Looking at the other noble truths, most religions acknowledge the pervasive reality of suffering, that it can end (if not in this life, then after), and that wisdom, compassion, and ethical living are a path to less suffering.

But why do we suffer at all? This is where Buddhism stands alone, offering a real-world explanation that is simple, testable, and, to my mind, irrefutable.
 

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

 


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.

Friday, April 16, 2021

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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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Vicious | ITV

Thursday, April 15, 2021

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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Wednesday, April 14, 2021

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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 -