The four immeasurables

Os quatro incomensuráveis - bondade amorosa, compaixão, alegria pela fortuna dos outros e equanimidade (The four immeasurables—loving kindness, compassion, rejoicing for others’ fortune, and equanimity) 

—Interview with Edward Simon by Gabriel Lefferts, “This Buddhist Life: Edward Simon”

Via Daily Dharma: Foundations First

If you want to be better at what you do—no matter what that may be—you want to start by being a better human being.

—Interview with Edward Simon by Gabriel Lefferts, “This Buddhist Life: Edward Simon”

Via Daily Dharma: Observe the Breath

When we truly observe the breath, we are automatically placed in the present. We are pulled out of the morass of mental images and into a bare experience of the here-and-now.

—Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, “Breathing”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - October 7, 2018

When you are experiencing fear, you are caught in your separateness. When you are experiencing love, you are caught in your unity with all things. Love, the verb love, is a vehicle of permeating boundaries. You feel the quality of love which means a flow of energy or merging with the universe around you. That one is obviously the antidote for fear. It´s going to the place behind your own separateness.

- Ram Dass -

META pra Brasil!

Que todos os seres encontrem a felicidade e as causas da felicidade.
Que todos os seres se libertem do sofrimento e das causas do sofrimento.
Que todos os seres encontrem a felicidade livre de sofrimento.
Que todos os seres vivam em equanimidade livres de paixões, de agressões e de preconceitos!

- Buda -

May all beings find happiness and the causes of happiness.
May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
May all beings find happiness free from suffering.
May all beings live in equanimity free from passions, aggressions and prejudices!

- Buddha -

Via Daily Dharma: Finding Freedom

What is freedom? It is nothing more, and nothing less, than life lived awake.

—Ken McLeod, “Forget Happiness”

Via Daily Dharma: Anchor Yourself in the Present Moment

The practice of meditation isn’t confined... to what happens when we’re practicing sitting meditation. We want to learn to be present, to use the breath as an anchor to the present moment, to cultivate ease and wellbeing, in all postures, at all times.

—Peter Doobinin, “Tough Lovingkindness”

Via Daily Dharma: Weathering Life’s Storms

When we take the one seat on our meditation cushion we become our own monastery. We create the compassionate space that allows for the arising of all things: sorrows, loneliness, shame, desire, regret, frustration, happiness.

—Jack Kornfield, “Take The One Seat”

Via Daily Dharma: Turn Towards Pain

In order to emerge from our pain, we have to enter it... when we thus relate to our pain, cultivating intimacy with it, we start liberating ourselves from our pain and from the painful consequences of avoiding our pain.

—Robert Augustus Masters, “A Painless Present”

Via Daily Dharma: Inspiration in Meditation

The key to maintaining your inspiration in the day-to-day work of meditation practice is to approach it as play—a happy opportunity to master practical skills, to raise questions, experiment, and explore. This is precisely how the Buddha himself taught meditation.

—Thanissaro Bhikkhu, “The Joy of Effort”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - October 3, 2018

When you give another human being, your family, or your business, the fullness of your being at any moment, a little is enough. When you give them half of it, because you’re time binding with your mind, there is never enough. You begin to hear the secret that being fully in the present moment is the greatest gift you can give to each situation.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Use Compassion to Connect

Compassion allows us to use our own pain and the pain of others as a vehicle for connection... Because compassion is a state of mind that is itself open, abundant, and inclusive, it allows us to meet pain more directly... we know that we are not alone in our suffering and that no one need feel alone when in pain.

—Sharon Salzberg, “A Quiver of the Heart”

Via Daily Dharma: Bare Awareness

What we regard as the self appears to be a solid, personal identity that perceives things. But in truth there is no metabeing who unifies the parts. All our actions happen without an agent, or self, performing them. There is no seer, just the seeing; no hearer, just the hearing.

—Cynthia Thatcher, “Disconnect the Dots”

Via Daily Dharma: Exponential Love

If we can keep from grasping at others with the selfish fear of losing them... then the energy of love increases and its quality of giving energy to others opens and expands.

—Thinley Rinpoche, “Continuous Mind”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - September 30, 2018

When you are in the presence of unconditional love, that is the optimum environment for your heart to open, because you feel safe, because you realize nobody wants anything from you. The minute your heart opens, you are once again getting into the flow. And that flow is where you experience God. 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: The Space We Need

Noticing the space around people and things provides a different way of looking at them, and developing this spacious view is a way of opening oneself. When one has a spacious mind, there is room for everything.

—Ajahn Sumedho, “Noticing Space”

Via Daily Dharma: Riding the Wave of the Universe

To live is to let go, and in order to live fully we must learn to let go fully and to embrace the flow that is the universe.

—Bodhipaksa, “What You’re Made Of”

Via Daily Dharma: Shared Happiness Is True Happiness

Happiness is not happiness unless it is shared. For happiness is the one thing in all the world that comes to us only at the moment we give it, and is likewise increased by being given away.

—Clark Strand, “The Wisdom Of Frogs”

Via Daily Dharma: The Journey to Meaning

If we wish to live well in the world, not just amble along through life without any examination of our being, then we must engage in the effort to find meaning in our lives.

—Eido Frances Carney, “The Way of Ryokan”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - September 26, 2018

When I look back on the suffering in my life, this may sound really strange, but I see it now as a gift. I would have never asked for it for a second. I hated it while it was happening and I protested as loudly as I could, but suffering happened anyway. Now, in retrospect I see the way in which it deepened my being immeasurably.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Watching Your Thoughts Disperse

Thoughts are like clouds and can vanish just as clouds naturally disperse into space.

—Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche and Tsoknyi Rinpoche, “As the Clouds Vanish”

Via Daily Dharma: The Dharma Shapes Us

The Buddha’s teachings are something enduring that shapes us, if we slow down enough to take them in. We’re not a big deal ... but the dharma is.

—Mary Talbot, “Old Tibet Meets the American Midwest”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - September 23, 2018

When I start to get angry, I see my predicament and how I’m getting caught in expectations and righteousness. Learning to give up anger has been a continuous process. When Maharaji told me to love everyone and tell the truth, he also said, “Give up anger, and I’ll help you with it.”
Maharaji offered me a bargain: “You must polish the mirror free of anger to see God. If you give up a little anger each day, I will help you.” This seemed to be a deal that was more than fair. I readily accepted. And he’s been true to his end of the bargain. I found that his love helped to free me from my righteousness. Ultimately I would rather be free and in love than be right.

-  Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Compassion For All

In difficult situations, [compassion] gives us the power to find a path that meets the vital interests of all concerned when possible and to minimize the pain when that is not possible. Compassion cuts through beliefs and goes straight to the heart.

—Ken McLeod, “Why Compassion?”

Via Ram Dass: How can we reconcile our spirituality and our religion?

How can we reconcile our spirituality and our religion?

Posted August 23, 2018

There was a great moment when I asked Trungpa Rinpoche for some meditation instruction.

He was sitting there with this saki bottle and he said, “What you should be doing now is this form of yoga called Ati yoga.” And he says, “You just will expand out, let’s do it.” So we sat there looking at each other and started to meditate.

Then after about 20 seconds he says, “Ram Dass?” I said, “Yes?” He said, “Are you trying?” I said, “Yes I’m trying!” He said, “No Ram Dass, don’t try, just do it.” I realized that in my zeal towards enlightenment, I’d turned it into another Jewish middle-class achievement task.

So this spiritual group started seeking disciplines and paths and practices and got very enamored of Eastern Wisdom, and this was earlier before the full response of the Western Religions in which they finally recognized that they had to make the esoteric more available, that they had to give up some power, because within the Eastern traditions the esoteric was available.

When people started to have these esoteric experiences, they were so thick, so fast, and so different, that it was ineffable – very hard to explain. There was no way I could even start to conceive of explaining it. I mean, it’s like, take this moment, how would you describe it? If you all gave a description, it would still fall short of the totality of what it was.

I think that my child rearing through the Jewish Conservative Reform track, if that had had enough spiritual sustenance in it, I might have turned to things like Kabbalah or Hasidic literature, and to Nachman, or to Baal Shem Tov or someone like that. But I still had such a reaction to the kind of social-political attachments to Judaism.

I was just looking for something that was touching a deeper place in me, than had never been touched by Judaism. Not that it couldn’t be, but that it had never happened.

So to me, the maps that were available clearly pointed toward the East, but as the years went by and I got to around 1967, I realized that nobody in the West knew how to read the maps. I mean, there were some that did, but I just didn’t know them, of course.

So basically, I went to the East looking for a map reader, and I found in my guru such a being. The best thing I can say about the quality of him was that over the few times I knew him, when he was in his body between ’67 and ’73, there were very few times I could ever find him.

What I recognized with him was that what I had been able to touch with acid, he could have without it.

We gave it to him. Nothing happened, because if you’re in Detroit, you don’t have to take a bus to Detroit. There was nowhere for him to go, he stayed in that space. We were looking to go somewhere, to change something, because we were holding somewhere. He wasn’t holding anywhere.

-Ram Dass

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Via Daily Dharma: Social Awakening

We must reclaim the concept of awakening from an exclusively individualistic therapeutic model and focus on how individual liberation also requires social transformation.

—David Loy, “Awakening in the Age of Climate Change”

Via Daily Dharma: The Wisdom Within You

Wisdom isn’t something you can “do” or “make happen”—it’s there in all of us. By becoming more familiar with that space within ourselves and trusting our own instincts more fully, we can learn to apply this quality of discriminating wisdom in everyday life.

—Andy Puddicombe, “10 Tips for Living More Mindfully”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - September 19, 2018

The quality of the heart is that it loves without discrimination, it just loves, it has no boundaries. The mind is continually setting boundaries. 'This is me, this is not me, this is good, this is bad.'

The mind is constantly judging, the heart is not judging, the heart is just opening. The heart is without boundaries, so the mind is actually afraid of the heart. That's what the interesting thing is, the battle that goes on in us - you're afraid of your own heart because your heart will give away the store.

The heart says, ‘You need my car, you need my house, you need my life, take it.’ And the mind is saying, ‘Now wait a minute. You've got your health insurance to pay, keep cool, don't blow the whole scene.’

So the interesting question is when and under what conditions can you meet people in such a way that you can keep your heart open without giving up your discriminative wisdom about how to be with another person.

- Ram Dass

From our new free 4-week online course 'The Yoga of Relationships: Exploring Connection and Sexuality Through the Lens of the Soul" - beginning September 24th.

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Via Daily Dharma: Embody Full Presence

In meditation, we train in letting go of thoughts of the past and future as they arise, and in tuning in to full, immediate presence instead.

—Pamela Gayle White, “What Our Memories Make Us”

Via Daily Dharma: The Language of Compassion

Nonviolent Communication... is a method for resolving conflict by expressing needs without blame or criticism, then listening and responding empathically.

—Katy Butler, “Say it Right”

Via Pinterest / Mudras

Via Daily Dharma: Embrace Your Shortcomings

Peace and kindness have their best shot at establishing themselves when we accept our own inadequacy, when limitation and error become aspects of ourselves we can embrace rather than strive to mask.

—Henry Shukman, “The Art of Being Wrong”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - September 16, 2018

"It’s amazing how the nature of your relationships change when it’s coming out of love instead of trying to get love."

- Ram Dass

From our new free 4-week online course 'The Yoga of Relationships: Exploring Connection and Sexuality Through the Lens of the Soul" - beginning September 24th.

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Via Daily Dharma: Trust in the Three Jewels

We can choose to take refuge in the brilliant sanity of enlightenment, the Buddha; trust the process of the path, the Dharma; and rely on the experience of those who guide us along the path, the Sangha.

—Lama Tsony, “Facing Fear”

Via Daily Dharma: Pure Selflessness

The act of giving purifies intention, the quality of mind with which any action is undertaken. For a brief moment, the giver’s self-absorption is lifted, attachment to the gift is relinquished, and kindness towards the recipient is developed.

—Andrew Olendzki, “The Wisdom of Giving”

Via Daily Dharma: Respecting Pain

How do we develop this appreciation of things just as they are, especially if we are sick and in pain? We must treat our pain gently, respectfully, not resisting it but living with it.

—Darlene Cohen, “The Practice of Nonpreference”

Via Daily Dharma: Positive Qualities Within

As progress is made on the path, the positive qualities required for further advancement will become part of you, and you will gradually learn how to assimilate and become these positive qualities, rather than regarding them as something to be attained and possessed.

—Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche, “Letting Go of Spiritual Experience”

Rostam - "In a River" (Official Animation Video)

Via Purple Buddha / Basics of Buddhism

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - September 12, 2018

“If there is one thing that a person needs from another human being, it’s to be appreciated, to be listened to, to be heard. Just as you are, not as I would make you."

- Ram Dass

From our new free 4-week online course 'The Yoga of Relationships: Exploring Connection and Sexuality Through the Lens of the Soul" - beginning September 24th.

Claim your spot here.

Via Daily Dharma: Where We Belong

We can get dragged back into the past, which can lead to depression, or we can become anxious about the future, which can lead to fear. Conscious breathing returns us to the here and the now, where we really belong.

—Gary Gach, “Brief Teachings”

Via Daily Dharma: Trusting Your Creativity

When we trust our creative energy, we encounter a supreme kind of enjoyment—an amazement at the natural unfolding of life beyond our ordinary way of looking at things.

—Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, “Free Expression”

Via Daily Dharma: Enlightened Transitions

All the transitions in life—dream, meditation, death, and rebirth, all the unending transitions in what we call existence and nonexistence—are each and every one a path of enlightenment.

—Douglas Penick, “Bidia Dandaron”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - September 9, 2018

"If I’m going to die, the best way to prepare is to quiet my mind and open my heart. If I’m going to live, the best way to prepare is to quiet my mind and open my heart. "

- Ram Dass, from his newly released book with co-author Mirabai Bush 'Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying'

Order your copy here.

Via Daily Dharma: Supportive Awareness

Awareness is the basis, or what you might call the “support,” of the mind. It is steady and unchanging, like the pole to which the flag of ordinary consciousness is attached.

—Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, “The Aim of Attention”

Via Daily Dharma: Simple Insight

The depth of experience, insight, and realization that can come from the practice of self-reflection is not a result of intellectual analysis or complex theories. Our challenge is to just see reality as it is.

—Gregg Krech, “Naikan Therapy”

Via Daily Dharma: Lovingkindness Is the Answer

In situations of conflict, lovingkindness and compassion grow when we understand them to be the most beneficial motivation for responsive and effective action.

—Joseph Goldstein, “Triumph of the Heart”

Via Daily Dharma: Emerging into Serenity

How does one come to a confident and positive view that is not naive, given the state of the world? By walking through one’s own anger and despair and emerging into serenity.

—James Thornton, “Radical Confidence”

Via Daily Dharma: The Ultimate Gift

To donate money, to offer your time and skills, to give food or drink, and to share tears or laughter, are all valuable ways to express generosity towards others…[but] the ultimate gift of all is the gift of our presence.

—Beth Roth, “Family Dharma: The Joy of Generosity”

Via Daily Dharma: The Dharma’s True Home

Liminality—in-between-ness—is the dharma’s dwelling place…The dharma’s true home is always in between, and that’s why it can set us free.

—Kurt Spellmeyer, “The Wisdom of Uncertainty”