Via Daily Dharma: We Lack Nothing

You lack nothing. You lack nothing of the wisdom and perfection of the Buddha, right at this moment. Hearing, breathing, you don’t differ even one drop from hearing, breathing Buddha.

Elihu Genmyo Smith, “No Need to Do Zazen, Therefore Must Do Zazen”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Speech: Refraining from Frivolous Speech

RIGHT SPEECH
Refraining from Frivolous Speech

Frivolous speech is unhealthy. Refraining from frivolous speech is healthy. (MN 9) Abandoning frivolous speech, one refrains from frivolous speech. One speaks at the right time, speaks only what is fact, and speaks about what is good. One speaks what is worthy of being overheard, words that are reasonable, moderate, and beneficial. (DN 1) One practices thus: “Others may speak frivolously, but I shall abstain from frivolous speech.”  (MN 8) An authentic person is one who even unasked reveals what is praiseworthy in others—how much more so when asked. When asked, however, and obliged to reply to questions, one speaks of what is praiseworthy in others, fully and in detail. (AN 4.73)

Reflection

It is not necessary to point out people’s flaws on a regular basis. Sometimes things need to be called out, and right speech does not mean covering up what is difficult. But it does point to the inherent harmfulness of being unnecessarily critical, which can damage the speaker as well as the target of such speech. You should focus on saying what is beneficial, and much of the time critical speech is rooted in an aggressive mental stance.

Daily Practice

Get in the habit of saying good things about people. Practice random acts of praise, even when not asked to do so. And when you do have an opportunity, don’t hold back on pointing out what is praiseworthy in others. We know this is important when raising children, so why not extend it to everyone? It turns out this is a healthy thing to do, because it both benefits others and brings out healthy states in you.

Tomorrow: Reflecting upon Social Action
One week from today: Refraining from False Speech

Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel

Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

 

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Intention: Cultivating Equanimity

 

RIGHT INTENTION
Cultivating Equanimity

Whatever you intend, whatever you plan, and whatever you have a tendency toward, that will become the basis upon which your mind is established. (SN 12.40) Develop meditation on equanimity, for when you develop meditation on equanimity, all aversion is abandoned. (MN 62)  The purpose of equanimity is warding off attachment. (Vm 9.97) When a person seeing a form with the eye is not attached to pleasing forms and not repelled by unpleasing forms, they have established mindfulness and dwell with an unlimited mind. For a person whose mindfulness is developed and practiced, the eye does not struggle to reach pleasing forms, and unpleasing forms are not considered repulsive. (SN 35.274)

Reflection

Equanimity is the antidote to aversion. Just as we can develop an aversive tendency through practice and habit, we can develop equanimity as a primary character trait and latent tendency. We can practice this at the level of primary sensory contact, such as described here using visual information. Practice just seeing what is there, without attachment or aversion; gaze upon your visual sphere with equanimity.

Daily Practice

When you are looking at something using your eyes, notice when this is accompanied by a subtle “I don’t like this” or “This is not good.” When you are aware of this happening, try replacing the aversion with an attitude of equanimity: “This is the way this is. I don’t need to judge it or disapprove of it. Let it be.” In this way the eye is not struggling against unpleasing forms and is thus not attached to their being different than they are.

Tomorrow: Refraining from Frivolous Speech
One week from today: Cultivating Lovingkindness

Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel

Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

Via Daily Dharma: Let Passing Thoughts Pass

 We have no control over what confronts us when we step out our door. We don’t blame ourselves when the weather is bad; we didn’t cause the weather and thus don’t feel responsible for it. But when passing thoughts appear in our mind, we often take them personally, as though we were the owner and controller of such thoughts.

Haemin Sunim, “Three Methods for Letting Go of Thoughts”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Via Facebook

 

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right View: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Way to the Cessation of Suffering

RIGHT VIEW
Understanding the Noble Truth of the Way to the Cessation of Suffering

And what is the way leading to the cessation of suffering? It is just this noble eightfold path: that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right living, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. (MN 9) One perfects their ethical behavior by abandoning misbehavior among sensual pleasures . . . (DN 2)

Reflection

This is by now a familiar theme for us, the focus on refining ethical behavior and abandoning actions driven by sensual pleasures. The path to the cessation of suffering can be followed only by observing the ethical precepts, and the precept guarding against inappropriate sexuality is as important as the others. Remember: sensuality can include a much wider range of interpretations than the merely sexual.

Daily Practice

Reflect honestly on your own behavior, especially the extent to which it may or may not be entangled in sensual desire. Sensuality is a sensitive and challenging topic, and it often seems there is an extra charge around matters of sexuality. This text is inviting you to look openly at ways leading to the end of suffering and in particular to look for ways in which a different perspective on sensuality might help reduce some kinds of suffering.

Tomorrow: Cultivating Equanimity
One week from today: Understanding the Noble Truth of Suffering

Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel

Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

 

Via Daily Dharma: The Work to Transform

 As long as we’re using up our energy to resist our circumstances, we won’t be able to dedicate it to the work of true transformation. 

Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, “The Gift of Contemplation”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Via Facebook \\ Sukhasiddhi Dag Shang Kagyu

Kyabje Karma Rangjung Khunkyab, Kalu Rinpoche:

Indian Buddhist master Shantideva emphasized in one of his works, that this precious human existence, with the opportunity and freedom for spiritual development, is very difficult to obtain, and if we have obtained it and do not make proper use of it How can we expect to get such an opportunity on the future? The question is that the human rebirth we are experiencing now, is not something random that takes place without meaning, nor effort. "It is something that happens with great difficulty, something that rarely happens."

 

Nineteen & Two
By Sofía Aguilar

I am mourning nineteen children I never knew.
I am mourning untied shoelaces and velcro straps, 

unzipped backpacks and incomplete homework. 

Their good grades in school
and the poor ones too.
Their gold stars and the bad marks,
their hair braided so tight with bolitas
before breakfast their head ached until dinner. 

How they scrunched up their faces at their baby studs and communion shoes,
straps marking their ankles skin-red.
How when crossing a street,
seeking solace from their fear
their fingers already knew
to clutch tight to another’s.
I am mourning their two teachers

who looked like my mother my tías
my abuelas
in an earlier life,

younger faces of the people I love. I am mourning the lost lunches and the lesson plans
left, laid out on their desks.

The notes and suggestions to their students,
spare thoughts they scribbled to themselves. Every day’s outfit planned before the week began ironed by hand and hung there in the closet,
the clothes they will never wear again.
In passing,
my father berates the Texas police
their lack of urgency
their defense of handcuffing
parents
families
tasing their bodies
to stop them from begging, ripping free
or breaking down the school doors in their fury.

I want to ask him,
If everyone had been white inside that school,
all blonde locks and fair faces,
the kind easily found and easily missed,
would the police have intervened?
Would they have risked their lives
to save a child they didn’t claim?
Or would they still have left nineteen children
and their two teachers for dead?
But already I know these are not the right questions. Instead,
What do we do
when we’re dying at the hands
of a shooter who was one of our own?
A boy who shared the rhythm of our name
and spoke the same language with
the same tongue in his mouth,
rather than a white man
with a colonized mind
and a gun in his hands
this country deems his right to wield?
I do not mourn him.

I don’t know how.
I mourn a community breaking from bullets
death
decay
deportation
assimilation
alienation
segregation
punishment for seeking a better life only to have it taken away instead.

I mourn the children who lived. Who remember those who didn’t.

Who now carry the burdens alone.

Sofía Aguilar is a Chicana poet based in Los Angeles and author of the forthcoming collection “STREAMING SERVICE: season two.” @sofiaxaguilar

Via Tumblr

 

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Mindfulness and Concentration: Establishing Mindfulness of Mind and the Third Jhāna

 

RIGHT MINDFULNESS
Establishing Mindfulness of Mind

A person goes to the forest or to the root of a tree or to an empty place and sits down. Having crossed the legs, one sets the body erect. One establishes the presence of mindfulness. (MN 10) One is aware: “Ardent, fully aware, mindful, I am content.” (SN 47.10)   When the mind is not uplifted, one is aware: “The mind is not uplifted.”. . . One is just aware, just mindful: “There is mind. “And one abides not clinging to anything in the world. (MN 10)

Reflection

The word uplifted in the original text carries a sense of both greater and loftier. Applying that to mind states, we might think of some states as more open or spacious than others, because they are more expanded in scope, encompassing a wider view. Or we might think of some states as more ethically refined than others; kindness, for example, is more “uplifted” than selfishness.

Daily Practice

As you sit in meditation and observe mental states arise and pass away in your consciousness, notice their quality. Notice in particular when your mind feels contracted; see what that feels like exactly. Notice also when the mental states that are present are ignoble or less than uplifted. You are just noticing, not judging. Abide mindful and fully aware of these states, "not clinging to anything."

RIGHT CONCENTRATION Approaching and Abiding in the Third Phase of Absorption (3rd Jhāna)

With the fading away of joy, one abides in equanimity. Mindful and fully aware, still feeling pleasure with the body, one enters upon and abides in the third phase of absorption, on account of which noble ones announce: "One has a pleasant abiding who has equanimity and is mindful." (MN 4) One practices: "I shall breathe in experiencing the whole body"; one practices: "I shall breathe out experiencing the whole body." This is how concentration by mindfulness of breathing is developed and cultivated so that it is of great fruit and great benefit. (SN 54.8)

Tomorrow: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Way to the Cessation of Suffering
One week from today: Establishing Mindfulness of Mental Objects and Abiding in the Fourth Jhāna

Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel

Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

Via Daily Dharma: Fully Participate

If we bring our full identities into practice with others, we can function within our identities in a way that is participatory rather than self-involved, and so allows us something beyond.

Leora Fridman, “Healthy Boundaries”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - June 5, 2022 💌

 

At some point awakening begins. The awakening happens with trauma or it happens when somebody you love dies. In sexuality you transcend separateness. It can be drugs. It can be meditation. It can be a hymn. It can be a leaf falling. It can be lying under the stars. It can be trying to solve a problem where your mind gets so one-pointed it goes through the veil. Whatever it is, you open up into other planes of consciousness that have been there in all the splendor all the time. 

- Ram Dass -

Via Tricycle // The Radical Power of Just Showing Up with Shelly Tygielski

 

June 4, 2022

Thriving in Community

 
The communities that thrive are the ones that work together. 

That’s the premise behind Pandemic of Love, a South Florida–based mutual aid organization that is now 2 million donors strong. Pandemic of Love was established in March 2020, when meditation teacher and community activist Shelly Tygielski looked around and realized that in her community there were people with needs—and people with the ability to fill those needs. The organization has brought people together in communities of care, supporting one another through the pandemic, mass shootings, and hurricanes. 

“In any ecosystem… organisms all need each other, not just merely to survive, but in fact to thrive,” she says. “When they work together, when they cooperate, when they give and take, they actually do a lot better than merely just surviving. I think that points to a lot of what we can look to as human beings.”

On the latest episode of the podcast Life As It Is, Tygielski sits down with Sharon Salzberg and Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, to discuss her work with Ukrainian refugees in Poland, the connection between self-care and social transformation, and the radical power of just showing up.
 

Listen to the full episode now »

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Effort: Developing Unarisen Healthy States

RIGHT EFFORT
Developing Unarisen Healthy States

Whatever a person frequently thinks about and ponders, that will  become the inclination of their mind. If one frequently thinks about and ponders healthy states, one has abandoned unhealthy states to cultivate healthy states, and then one’s mind inclines to healthy states. (MN 19) Here a person rouses the will, makes an effort, stirs up energy, exerts the mind, and strives to develop the arising of unarisen healthy mental states. One develops the unarisen mindfulness-     awakening factor. (MN 141)

Reflection

Mindfulness can be an active state of mind when it is arising in the present moment in your lived experience, or it can be a personality or character trait lying dormant in the unconscious mind, waiting to be activated. In Buddhist language this is indicated by saying mindfulness is either arisen or unarisen, and a different strategy is needed for each situation. Here we are told how to awaken our innate mindfulness by an act of will.

Daily Practice

Develop your latent capacity for mindfulness by bringing it from a passive trait to an active state as often as you can. It is mostly a matter of remembering to do so. It is not difficult to be mindful, but it can be difficult to remember to be mindful. When you are able to do this more often, the habit of being consciously aware of your experience grows and mindfulness becomes the inclination of your mind. This is good for you.

Tomorrow: Establishing Mindfulness of Mind and Abiding in the Third Jhāna
One week from today: Maintaining Arisen Healthy States

Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel

Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

 

Via Daily Dharma: Lasting Happiness

 You need strong determination to overcome harmful habits. But the payoff is happiness—not just for today but for always.

Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, Getting Started

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Via L.A. Times // Newsletter: Why LGBTQ rights may be secure despite the Supreme Court

 

Make the jump here to read the full article

Via Daily Dharma: A Wise Response in a Complex World

Making space for the truth of our feelings is essential for keeping the heart healthy and finding a wise response in this complex world.

Oren Jay Sofer, “Why We Need Both Grief and Gratitude”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Living: Abstaining from Misbehaving Among Sensual Pleasures

 

RIGHT LIVING
Undertaking the Commitment to Abstain from Misbehaving Among Sensual Pleasures    

Sensual misconduct is unhealthy. Refraining from sensual misconduct is healthy. (MN 9) Abandoning sensual misconduct, one abstains from misbehaving among sensual pleasures. (MN 41) One practices thus: “Others may engage in sensual misconduct, but I will abstain from sensual misconduct.” (MN 8) Forms cognizable by the eye are of two kinds: those to be cultivated and those not to be cultivated. Such forms as cause, in one who cultivates them, unhealthy states to increase and healthy states to diminish, such forms are not to be cultivated. But such forms as cause, in one who cultivates them, unhealthy states to diminish and healthy states to increase, such forms are to be cultivated. (MN 114)

Reflection

As humans we use our eyes a lot. Mostly we are free to choose what we gaze on, but in many cases our attention is hijacked by visual images directed at us from a billboard, a magazine page, or a computer screen. Sometimes this provokes craving of various sorts and is thus a way of engaging us in sensual misconduct against our will. Learning to resist being hijacked by images and to abandon it when it happens is a healthy skill.

Daily Practice

Notice the quality of your mind as you take in visual information. The more you look at something, does it increase or decrease your stress? Does it make you more calm and at ease or does it wind you up? What you look at is one thing; how you feel when you do so is something else. Learn to observe the inner state evoked by sensory inputs and to thereby learn what to cultivate and what not to cultivate for your own well-being.

Tomorrow: Developing Unarisen Healthy States
One week from today: Abstaining from Intoxication

Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel

Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.