VIa Daily Dharma: Our Life’s Work

Life is precious, and so death must be precious too. Our job is to figure out why.

—Shozan Jack Haubner, “Consider the Seed”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - December 6, 2017

 

Bearing the unbearable is the deepest root of compassion in the world. When you bear what you think you cannot bear, who you think you are dies. You become compassion. You don't have compassion - you are compassion. True compassion goes beyond empathy to being with the experience of another. You become an instrument of compassion.

- Ram Dass  -

Via Daily Dharma: You’re Already Whole

The great Buddhist truth is that we have been whole from the very beginning: we need only realize it.

—Taylor Plimpton, “Expressing the Inexpressible”

Via Daily Dharma: Setting Healthy Boundaries

A lack of healthy boundaries can lead to our compassion being blown away before it’s had a chance to take root. As we develop, though, boundaries held too tightly can stifle our compassion.

—Lorne Ladner, “Taking a Stand”

Via Daily Dharma: Don’t Let Your Possessions Own You

It is not the number and diversity of our possessions that is the problem but our attachment to them. . . . What we need to relinquish, therefore, is our attachment to possessions and experiences, not the things themselves.

—Toinette Lippe, “Between Eternities”

Via Daily Dharma: Love Makes a Meaningful Life

Grace provides the framework within which a meaningful life is lived. Love is the substance of it day to day. To live a spiritual life, then, is essentially to do things “for the love of it.”

—Dharmavidya David Brazier, “Let Grace In”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom for December 3, 2017

We are training to be nobody special. And it is in that nobody-specialness that we can be anybody.  

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma / Do You Speak Kindly to Yourself?

Conventionally, right speech refers to how we speak to others, but I also believe it can help us pay attention to how we speak to ourselves. 

—Mark Epstein, “If the Buddha were Called to Jury Duty”

via Daily Dharma / How Goals Can Limit You

As long as we practice in a goal-oriented framework, the harder we practice the more we reinforce that framework.

—Ken McLeod, “Where the Thinking Stops”

Via Daily Dharma: A Benefit of Giving Up Certainty

Giving up one’s own certainties can open up a door toward a deeper intimacy with things, especially with people.

—Henry Shukman, “Far from Home”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - November 29, 2017

 

If we have finally decided we want God, we’ve got to give it all up. The process is one of keeping the ground as we go up, so we always have ground, so that we’re high and low at the same moment – that’s a tough game to learn, but it’s a very important one. The game isn’t to get high – the game is to get balanced and liberated.

 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Joy Arises from Simplicity

Once we are willing to be directly intimate with our life as it arises, joy emerges out of the simplest of life experiences.

—Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, “Simple Joy”

Via 7 of 12 Daily Dharma: Break through Walls with Dharma

The dharma breaks through every wall we erect because its ultimate goal is compassion, but compassion arises only when we embrace the foreigner as the self.

—Kurt Spellmeyer, “Globalism 3.0”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - November 26, 2017

The sooner one develops compassion in this journey, the better. Compassion lets us appreciate that each individual is doing what he or she must do, and that there is no reason to judge another person or oneself. You merely do what you can to further your own awakening.  

-  Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Spiritual Goal-Setting

If you aren’t careful, you’ll spend your whole life doing nothing besides waiting for your ordinary-person hopes to someday be fulfilled.

—Kodo Sawaki Roshi, “To You”

Via Daily Dharma: We Are All Believers

When we see that belief gives color to every stratum of our experience of reality, we can embrace others as kindred believers, regardless of the shades we tend to favor.

—Pamela Gayle White, “Real Belief”

Via Daily Dharma: Don’t Spend Your Time on Trivial Pursuits

It is easy to fritter away your time in frivolous pursuits that do not lead anywhere. But living in this way is like eating junk food: it is ultimately unsatisfying.

—Judy Lief, “Train Your Mind: Don’t Be Frivolous”

Via Daily Dharma: Grounding Oneself in Wisdom and Compassion

In an ecosystem of dharma awareness a spiral of gratitude radiates out, grounded in the wisdom teachings and compassion of heart and mind.

—Wendy Johnson, “Spiral of Gratitude”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - November 22, 2017

If you’re involved with relationships with parents or children, instead of saying, "I can’t do spiritual practices because I have children," you say, "My children are my spiritual practice." If you’re traveling a lot, your traveling becomes your yoga.

You begin to use your life as your curriculum for coming to God. You use the things that are on your plate, that are presented to you. So that relationships, economics, psychodynamics—all of these become grist for the mill of awakening. They're all a part of your curriculum.

- Ram Dass -