A personal blog by a graying (mostly Anglo with light African-American roots) gay left leaning liberal progressive married college-educated Buddhist Baha'i BBC/NPR-listening Professor Emeritus now following the Dharma in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
The more you contemplate space, the more you are aware of the dissolution of everything you have assumed to be real, lasting, and reliable—including your motivation and your practice.
The Afterlife of Japanese American Wartime Incarceration Brandon Shimoda in conversation with James Shaheen
In this episode of Tricycle Talks, poet Brandon Shimoda explores the ongoing legacies of the US government’s mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during World War II.
Whatever you intend, whatever you plan, and whatever you have a tendency toward, that will become the basis on which your mind is established. (SN 12.40) Develop meditation on lovingkindness, for when you develop meditation on lovingkindness, all ill will will be abandoned. (MN 62)
The function of lovingkindness is preferring welfare. (Vm 9.93)
Reflection
Kindness is a habit, like everything else in our emotional range. It can be learned and reinforced and cultivated, or it can be neglected, abandoned, and suppressed. Why not practice kindness by fostering the welfare of all beings, including yourself? Like any habit, it takes time and patience to interrupt the reflex to blame and hate and to install the new patterns of thought and behavior. But it can be done. So let’s do it!
Daily Practice
Lovingkindness can be invoked at any time. Look for opportunities to think kindly of other people, to wish them well, and to soften your heart. Do this especially as an antidote if you feel yourself going in the other direction and feeling ill will toward someone. Lovingkindness and ill will cannot coexist in a single mind moment, so you always have a choice to feel friendly or feel hostile in any situation. May you choose wisely.
Tomorrow: Refraining from False Speech One week from today: Cultivating Compassion
Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media #DhammaWheel
Read commentary from teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh and Shunryu Suzuki Roshi on the sutra that famously states that “form is emptiness; emptiness is form.”
Everything that exists in this world has a meaning. It is beyond presumption for human beings to decide merely based on their needs or likes and dislikes what is valuable and what is not.
