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

 

 

"We’re all distracted by phenomena, everything that’s going on all the time.  
 
Mindfulness is one of the practices for slowing down our lives, for finding a way inside, for concentrating self-awareness. It can help us to quiet down and find our way into who we are.    
 
Finding our true self is a lifelong search. It’s not called practice for nothing. You actually have to tread on the path to get somewhere. Not that there’s anywhere to go, it’s just about becoming more here, being more present in this moment.    
 
Once we begin to explore our own psyche and mind and heart, we begin to appreciate that everybody else is in the same situation. We’re not so different. Each of us is an individual awareness living with our particular karma or family situation or what we do, our cultural milieu. Awareness itself is something that we all share. It’s what makes us human and divine.    
 
When you take away the content or the objects of awareness, thinking about the weather or what you’re going to do today, and just stay with the awareness, awareness is the same. That sense of interconnectedness happens as a corollary to mindfulness practice or any kind of meditation practice because awareness is a universal experience.    
 
Interconnected consciousness is real. How we come to that experience happens through many different avenues for different people. When we realize our consciousness exists beyond our mind and senses, then we can go about finding our true nature as the Zen Buddhists would put it.    
 
Different traditions call the reality of consciousness so many different things, from soul to pure mind, Buddha mind, but once we accept that reality, it makes sense to embark on a practice that includes developing awareness. That is the first step, having a new perspective outside the constant I, me, mine of the ego. Once there is a movement beyond that very self-centered point in time and space, then there is opportunity for real change." 

 - Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Dharma Is the Mind

 The Dharma is the mind, not merely the brain, or the human spirit... It is vast and fathomless, pure and clear, altogether empty, and charged with possibilities. It is the unknown, the unnameable, from which and as which all beings come forth.

—Robert Aitken, “The Nature of the Precepts”

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Via L.A.Times

 

Via Tricycle // Then & Now

 

Then & Now By Joan Duncan Oliver

All things are impermanent—including opinions. Tricycle’s contributors take a moment to consider how their views have, or have not, changed since the early days of the magazine.

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Via Daily Dharma: What Is Yoga?

The word yoga refers to the integration of body, breath, and mind, and to the dissolution of the sense of separation between the “self” as subject and the “other” as object. Whenever this state manifests—whether one is sitting, walking, cutting carrots, or changing diapers—there is yoga.

—Frank Jude Boccio, “Breath and the Body”

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Via Tricycle - RAIN: The Nourishing Art of Mindful Inquiry

 

RAIN: The Nourishing Art of Mindful Inquiry
With Michele McDonald
Now available for self-study 

Emotions are so wrapped up with our everyday experience that the two often seem inseparable. But by using the qualities of attention that make up a complete moment of mindfulness, we are given the liberating choice to respond to whatever comes our way—and not just blindly react to the world at-large.

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Via Daily Dharma: Refined Silence

Nuance can be found and communicated in complete silence.

—Shin Yu Pai, “No Need for Words”

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Via Daily Dharma: Open Yourself to Beauty

 When we choose to use mindfulness and meditation not only to become aware of our own grief and how it impacts our life but also to accept the inevitability of loss and of failure, we open ourselves up to new possibilities. We open ourselves up to beauty.

—Breeshia Wade, “Loss Doesn’t Need to Be Feared”

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Via Daily Dharma: Find Your Rhythm

During meditation, we create a refuge in which we can better discern and understand what’s going on in our constantly shifting private landscape. Revisiting this on a regular basis provides each of us with a unique and intimate rhythm of discovery.

—Lauren Krauze, “A Watchfulness Routine for Writing”

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Via Daily Dharma: Truth Will Set Us Free

Liberation comes not by believing in the right set of tenets or of dogmatic assertions, or even necessarily by behaving in the right way. It’s insight, it’s wisdom, it’s knowing the nature of reality. It is only truth that will make us free.

—Interview with B. Alan Wallace by James Shaheen, “What Is True Happiness?”

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Via Tricycle // The McMindfulness Wars

The McMindfulness Wars
By Ira Helderman

 

Psychotherapists today often feel trapped between the therapeutic potential and the serious limitations of contemporary mindfulness-based interventions.

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Via Daily Dharma: Grief Is Like a Stream

Grief is like a stream running through our life, and it’s important to understand that it doesn’t go away. Our grief lasts a lifetime, but our relationship to it changes. Moving on is the period in which the knot of your grief is untied. It’s the time of renewal.

—Martha Beck, “Elegy for Everything”

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Via Beyond The Veil where the Angels Ascend

 

Via Daily Dharma: Transforming Suffering Into Compassion

Suffering and its unwholesome causes are not to be escaped but to be confronted—and eventually transformed into wisdom and compassion.

—Reverend Patti Nakai, “Someone Is Jealous of You”

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Via Daily Dharma: Training Positivity

We train to be aware of what we are thinking and to breathe with it, relax it, and change it to a more balanced view, recognizing the good conditions that are still available to us. We can remind ourselves, “Smile. Choose to think of it in a positive way.”

—Sister Dang Nghiem, “Rehearsing Suffering”

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Via White Crane Insitute // TOBY JOHNSON

 

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Toby Johnson

1945 -

TOBY JOHNSON an American novelist and writer in the field of Gay spirituality. Johnson is author of three autobiographical accounts of spiritual development: The Myth of the Great Secret: A Search for Meaning in the Face of Emptiness about his discovering a modern understanding of religion; In Search of God in the Sexual Underworld about his experiences — and interpretation of events as a religion scholar—in the study of teenage prostitution; and The Myth of the Great Secret: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell which added substantial anecdotal material about his mentor.

After leaving seminary in 1970, Johnson moved to San Francisco and lived in the Bay Area throughout the 1970s. While a student at the California Institute of Asian Studies (later renamed the California Institute of Integral Studies), from which he received a graduate degree in Comparative Religion and a doctorate in Counseling Psychology, Johnson was on staff at the Mann Ranch Seminars, a Jungian-oriented summer retreat program. There he befriended religion scholar Joseph Campbell and came to regard himself "an apostle of Campbell's vision to the gay community."

Johnson has authored three novels: Plague: A Novel About Healing, Secret Matter, and Getting Life in Perspective. Plague, produced was one of the first novels to treat AIDS through fiction. Secret Matter, a speculative, romantic comedy about truth-telling and Gay identity featuring a retelling of the Genesis myth with a Gay-positive outcome, won a Lambda Literary Award in 1990 and in 1999 was a nominee to the Gay Lesbian Science-Fiction Hall of Fame, the first year of the award.

He collaborated on the novel Two Spirits: A Story of Life With the Navajo and co-edited, an anthology of Gay-positive stories, Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling.

He is also author of Gay Spirituality: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness and Gay Perspective: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the Universe, which explains how homosexuality can lead to a re-evaluation of people's role in the universe.

Johnson's central idea is that as outsiders with non-gender-polarized perspective homosexuals play an integral role in the evolution of consciousness — especially regarding the understanding of religion as myth and metaphor — and that for many homosexuals Gay identity is a transformative ecological, spiritual, and even mystical vocation.

From 1996 to 2003, Johnson was editor/publisher of White Crane, a periodical focusing on Gay wisdom, culture and spirituality. As of 2012, he worked as a literary editor  He and his husband, Kip Dollar, live in Texas where they were recently married on March 16th, 2018. He is a friend to this writer, now, of many years and I want to personally wish him a very happy birthday. 

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - August 4, 2021 💌

 
 

"As you progress with your sadhana you may find it necessary to change your occupation. Or you may find that it is only necessary to change the way in which you perform your current occupation in order to bring it into line with your new understanding of how it all is. The more conscious that a being becomes, the more he can use any occupation as a vehicle for spreading light.

The next true being of Buddha-nature that you meet may appear as a bus driver, a doctor, a weaver, an insurance salesperson, a musician, a chef, a teacher, or any of the thousands of roles that are required in a complex society—the many parts of Christ’s body. You will know them because the simple dance that may transpire between you—such as handing them change as you board the bus—will strengthen in you the faith in the divinity of humans. It’s as simple as that."

  - Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Altruism Is Happiness

 

Everything ultimately depends on one’s own action. If you help others, if you serve others, you benefit. So altruism is a source of happiness.

—Interview with the Dalai Lama by Daniel Goleman, “How to Serve Humanity”

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Via Daily Dharma: Practice Is Enlightenment

Practice and enlightenment are mutually correlative; they evolve in conjunction with each other. You won’t have a sophisticated practice without a sophisticated image of enlightenment nor a profound image of enlightenment without profound practice.

—Interview with Dale Wright by Sam Mowe, “Why Enlightenment Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All”

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