We teach what we have learned. We act as we have been acted upon. A person who is not loving has not experienced love. It is not his fault. Realizing this gives rise to forgiveness.
Saturday, August 14, 2021
Thursday, August 12, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Nipping the Buds of Negative Emotions
We
create anger by a series of thoughts that result in a particular
emotional and physiological state. Anger doesn’t just happen to us. If
we’re able to catch an angry thought as it’s budding, we can let it go.
Wednesday, August 11, 2021
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.
Tuesday, August 10, 2021
Via Tricycle // Then & Now
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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.
Monday, August 9, 2021
Via Tricycle - RAIN: The Nourishing Art of Mindful Inquiry
RAIN: The Nourishing Art of Mindful Inquiry
With Michele McDonald
Now available for self-study
With Michele McDonald
Now available for self-study
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Sunday, August 8, 2021
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.
Saturday, August 7, 2021
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.
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?”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Thursday, August 5, 2021
Via Tricycle // The McMindfulness Wars
The McMindfulness Wars
By Ira Helderman
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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.
Wednesday, August 4, 2021
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.
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.”
Via White Crane Insitute // 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 -
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