Via Daily Dharma: True Peace

Suffering comes to an end only when a person is so in touch with life that he or she is completely at peace, regardless of physical or emotional circumstances.

—Ken McLeod, “Bodhicitta Explained”

Via Daily Dharma: Uncontrollable Joy

We can’t control joy. It is something that bobs up when we are truly alive and meet the whole world in an instant.

—Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, “Simple Joy”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - April 29, 2018

It is important, as we get older, to learn how to grieve. Although this may sound self-evident, experience has taught me that it is not. In a culture that emphasizes stoicism and forward movement, in which time is deemed “of the essence,” and there is little toleration for slowness, inwardness, and melancholy, grieving – a healthy, necessary aspect of life – is too often overlooked.

Over the years, in working with people who are grieving, I’ve encouraged them first of all to surrender to the experience of their pain. To counteract our natural tendency to turn away from pain, we open to it as fully as possible and allow our hearts to break. We must take enough time to remember our losses – be they friends or loved ones passed away, the death of long-held hopes or dreams, the loss of homes, careers, or countries, or health we may never get back again. Rather than close ourselves to grief, it helps to realize that we only grieve for what we love. 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Humility and Pilgrimage

There is humility in the act of pilgrimage, akin to the act of bowing; you’re surrendering your own path to follow where others have gone before.

—Pico Iyer, “The Long Road to Sitting Still”

Via Daily Dharma: Where’s Your Sense of Adventure?

As spiritual practitioners we need to have some curiosity about the unknown. When unexplored territory frightens us, we need to ask ourselves, “Where’s our sense of adventure?”

—Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel, “Open Stillness”

Via Daily Dharma: You Are Already Complete

Why is it that we yearn to be more or other than we are? It so rarely occurs to us that what we are looking for maybe—indeed, always is—already within us, simply undiscovered.

—Toinette Lippe, “Between Eternities”

Via Daily Dharma: How to Cultivate Equanimity

If a mind state or emotion or mood becomes strong—feelings such as sadness or happiness or anger or desire, restlessness or excitement, interest or rapture, joy or calm—make the mental note of that mind state, feeling it and observing how that too is part of the passing show. It arises, it is there for some time, it passes away.

—Joseph Goldstein, “Breathing”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - April 25, 2018

There is great delight in tuning through a variety of different methods, and really looking to each method to move you in its own unique way while continuing to open you up. So be very generous in your opening to methods, because if you bring to them a pure heart and a yearning to be free, they will serve you in that way.

The way you get your karmuppance with methods, if you use them for power, you get power - but then you are stuck with the power. If you use them to reinforce your separateness, you get left in your separateness...

 - Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Dismantling Delusion

To experience the everyday sublime one needs to dismantle piece by piece the perceptual conditioning that insists on seeing oneself and the world as essentially comfortable, permanent, solid, and mine.

—Stephen Batchelor, “The Everyday Sublime”

Via Daily Dharma: Active Refuge

Committing to this path is not an act that we can carry out once and for all, like a “conversion” or a baptism, but an act that must be renewed each day.

—Fabrice Midal, “Brief Teachings”

Happy Earth Day!

Happy Earth Day!

The environment is not merely the place where we live and act, for the biosphere is the ground from which and within which we arise. The earth is not only our home, it is our mother.

—David Loy, “Healing Ecology”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - April 22, 2018

Surrender who you think you are and what you think you are doing into what is. It is mind boggling to think that spirituality is dying into yourself.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Mother of All Beings

The environment is not merely the place where we live and act, for the biosphere is the ground from which and within which we arise. The earth is not only our home, it is our mother.

—David Loy, “Healing Ecology”

Via Daily Dharma: We Are Temporary Too

Know that your precious, infinitely beloved, and irreplaceable self will dissolve like a sand castle, grain by grain—and what a relief it is to know. You exist in a great space of knowing, filled with the shared ephemerality of all things.

—Sallie Tisdale, “Self-Care for Future Corpses”

Via Daily Dharma: How to Truly Relax

When we understand that nothing exists independently, everything that does arise seems more dreamlike and less threatening. This brings a deep sense of relaxation, and we feel less need to control our mind and circumstances.

—Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, “The Theater of Reflection”

Via Daily Dharma: How to Speak with Care

When we speak with greater skill, our true self—our compassionate, loving self—emerges with gentle ease. So before you speak, stop, breathe, and consider if what you are about to say will improve upon the silence.

—Allan Lokos, “Skillful Speech”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - April 18, 2018

Ramana Maharshi said that God, guru, and the Self are the same. The guru, the true guide, awakens our own deeper being, or ātman, which is God itself. Ramana Maharshi realized that Self directly. His view from the Arunachala mountain, his darshan, his teaching, pointed directly at the ātman, at Self-realization. That unity of God, guru, and Self is the higher truth, and if your veil of attachment is very thin, you may be able, like Ramana, to penetrate directly to that essence in the heart.

But most of us, to get through our busy human incarnation and the profusion of forms we find in our lives, need guidance and help. Seeing the guru as separate from oneself is a way to approach it in steps of lesser truths. It’s a first step toward becoming the One. The reality of the guru or guide as separate from oneself is a method or vehicle for coming to God. It’s using a relationship with a separate entity, dualism, to get to the One, to the reality that the guru is identical with your inmost being.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: The Joy of Giving

At its most basic level, dana [generosity] in the Buddhist tradition means giving freely without expecting anything in return.

—Gil Fronsdal, “The Joy of Giving”

Via Daily Dharma: The Self Will Surprise You

The realization of no self is not at all nihilistic. It simply means that the self is something different from what we habitually assume it to be.

—Guo Jun, “The Calligrapher’s Apprentice”

Via Daily Dharma: Let the World Be Your Teacher

When you forget all your dualistic ideas, everything becomes your teacher, and everything can be the object of worship.

—Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, “Bowing”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - April 15, 2018

How would I like to enter my own death? With a feeling of, I don't know, but wow! It's going to be interesting.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Be a Lamp Unto Yourself

A teacher, out of compassion and love, seeing that somebody is suffering, gives a path. But each individual has to walk on the path.

—Interview with S. N. Goenka by Helen Tworkov, “Superscience”

Via Daily Dharma: Are You Truly Alive?

To acknowledge that you are dying is to recognize that you are alive.

—Dean Rolston, “Memento Mori”

Via Daily Dharma: Happiness Is Right Here

When we believe that happiness should take a particular form, we fail to see the opportunities for joy that are right in front of us.

—Thich Nhat Hanh, “Cultivating Compassion”

Via Our Lady of Lust and Grace / FB:

Via Daily Dharma: No Matter What Happens

It doesn’t matter what is happening. What matters is how we are relating to our experience.

—Tara Brach, “Making Room for Desire”

Via Daily Dharma: Transforming Hatred

Hatred brings more hatred, and violence only brings more violence. What we must do is stop this cycle here and now by transforming anger and hatred into compassion.

—Nawang Gehlek Rimpoche, “The Real Enemy”

Via Ram Dass/ Words of Wisdom - April 11, 2018

 

What I used to do is wait in line and I’d do mantra or breathing. I’d go into my Vipassana meditation. But now I’m interested in whether waiting in line at the bank can itself be the thing. I notice my impatience, notice the feeling in my feet as I am standing there, notice the different levels of reality of the people I’m looking at. Am I seeing a bank teller or am I seeing the Divine Mother as a bank teller? I allow myself to play with the moment more, still dealing with the stuff of the moment rather than going away.

-Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: The Pleasure Paradox

The odd thing about pleasure is that instead of fully enjoying what is here, being able to be fully present with it, we are busy looking for more. We miss the true depth of pleasure by being intoxicated with the possibility of more.

—Roshi Nancy Mujo Baker, “The Non-use of Intoxicants”

Via Daily Dharma: Shine the Light of Insight

Simply by turning on the light, you can instantly destroy the darkness. Likewise, even a rather simple analysis of ego-clinging and afflictive emotions can make them collapse.

—Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, “An Investigation of the Mind”

Via Daily Dharma: Why We Change

We ourselves and everything in our world arise and pass away because the conditions supporting our existence are constantly changing.

—Winton Higgins, “Treading the Path with Care”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - April 8, 2018

It’s interesting that the purer one’s heart becomes, the more the tiniest act is that which resonates in an appropriate fashion to bring a deeper harmony, a deeper way back into the Tao—as if one ever left it.  

 

-Ram Dass-

Via Daily Dharma: What Mindfulness Can Teach Us

Mindfulness practice isn’t meant to eliminate thinking but aims rather to help us know what we’re thinking when we’re thinking it, just as we want to know what we’re feeling when we’re feeling it.

—Sharon Salzberg, “Mindfulness and Difficult Emotions”

Via Daily Dharma: The Value of Trustworthy Friends

If you really want to become skillful in your thoughts, words, and deeds, you need a trustworthy friend to point out your blind spots.

—Thanissaro Bhikkhu, “The Power of Judgment”

Via Daily Dharma: Nobody to Be, Nothing to Strive For

To study the way of enlightenment is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.

—Eihei Dogen Zenji, “Tea and Rice”

Via Daily Dharma: Assessing Your Quality of Mind

Meditation requires some degree of being aware of awareness itself. We become cognizant of the quality of the mind, not just of phenomena perceived by the mind.

—Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, “The Good Shepherd”

Via Ram Dass - Words of Wisdom - April 4, 2018

To bring to our daily life a quality of awareness, an open-heartedness, a consciousness that understands the interrelationship of all things, means that we can begin to hear the way in which we can live on Earth in harmony with all things

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Cultivate Contentment

Cultivate generosity. Delight in giving. Learn to live lightly. In this way, we can begin to transform what is negative into what is positive.

—Interview with Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo by Lucy Powell, “No Excuses”

Via Ram Dass \ Words of Wisdom - April 1, 2018

When you learn to honor everybody you meet as your teacher, you'll see that there is nothing else you can do but be conscious, for the good of yourself and your fellow men and women. You begin to see that everything in your universe becomes your teacher - so your teacher is everywhere. You don’t have to rush to India because it’s always right where you are.

There are beings who can get as high as any enlightened being ever got, sitting in the middle of Topeka, Kansas or in the middle of New York, or in the middle of anywhere. It depends on your readiness, and that has to do with your karma or your readiness to get on with it.

Ram Dass

Via Daily Dharma: Love Sees Clearly

Boundless love, in contrast to clinging and attachment, is the wish for everyone everywhere to have happiness and its causes. It banishes hatred. Love sees everything without distortion.

—Anne C. Klein, “The Four Immeasurables”

Via Tumblr

Via Daily Dharma: Integrate Meditation into Every Moment

No matter what we encounter, whether it is possible for us to practice formally or not, we can still put ourselves in touch with that sense of simplicity and attentiveness, the basic presence that formal meditation cultivates—and project that out.

—Judy Lief, “On the Contagious Power of Presence”

Via Daily Dharma: Be Consistent, Not Insistent

To keep your practice consistent, remember what the famous Nike ad says: “Just do it.” Don’t concern yourself with trying to get to some particular place or state of mind. Each day’s zazen will be a little different, just like the rest of life.

—Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, “An Introduction to Zen”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - March 28, 2018

Compassionate action is a path on which we grow in awareness and insight. As we grow, we become purer instruments for change. We become hollow reeds for the healing music of life. 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: You Must Walk the Path Yourself

It is essential at the beginning of practice to acknowledge that the path is personal and intimate. It is no good to examine it from a distance as if it were someone else’s. You must walk it for yourself.

—Robert Aitken, “The Teacher in Everything”

Via Daily Dharma: Do Not Avoid, Do Not Desire

In birth there is nothing but birth and in death there is nothing but death. Accordingly, when birth comes, face and actualize birth, and when death comes, face and actualize death. Do not avoid them or desire them.

—Eihei Dogen Zenji, “Birth and Death”

Via Daily Dharma: Dharma Works. Do You?

If you are willing to do whatever it takes to find your way out of suffering—and it means confronting the roots of resistance and craving right here, right now—you can reach complete success.

—Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, “Getting Started”

Via Daily Dharma: What Sound Meditation Can Teach Us

Sounds, like everything else, arise and pass away. Just by listening, you can experience the insight of impermanence.

—Sylvia Boorstein, “Sound Meditation”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - March 25, 2018

You and I are in training to be conscious, to be conscious and compassionate in the truest, deepest sense—not romantically compassionate, but deeply compassionate. To be able to be an instrument of equanimity, an instrument of joy, an instrument of presence, an instrument of love, an instrument of availability, and at the same moment, absolutely quiet.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Creating New Habits

Sitting practices that focus on relaxing the underlying tensions and holdings you feel in your body, as well as restrictions to the breath, help you mitigate the legacy and habit patterns of reacting, clinging, and aversion.

—Will Johnson, “Full Body, Empty Mind”