Via Daily Dharma: Paint Your Own Future

 Past karma shapes your experience of the world. It exists; there is not much you can do about it. Yet, you are also constantly creating new karma, and that gives you a golden opportunity. With your reaction to each experience, you create the karma that will color your future.

Trungram Gyalwa Rinpoche, “The Power of the Third Moment”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Via Lion's Roar // The Spring Prayer

 

The Spring Prayer

Shozan Jack Haubner presents a prayer for the chaotic awakening of nature that is spring.

Spring is when the mountain comes alive. If there’s been a lot of snow, and suddenly there’s tons of sun, things start crawling out of the earth, stirred to life by the contrasts in their surroundings. The hills basically go nuts. You’re walking down the gravel driveway under a canopy of chirping treetops and suddenly a pair of chipmunks falls on top of you. “Sorry dude,” their little scampering body language says. “But something’s goin’ down on this mountain and we’re just part of it!”

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Mindfulness and Concentration: Establishing Mindfulness of Body and the First Jhāna

RIGHT MINDFULNESS
Establishing Mindfulness of Body

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 walking, one is aware: "I am walking."… One is just aware, just mindful: "There is a body." And one abides not clinging to anything in the world. (MN 10)

Reflection

As we gain the ability to be mindful of the body while breathing in and out, experiencing the entire body and stilling its activities, it becomes natural to extend this capacity for awareness to other normal activities. One of these is walking, and the point is not to get somewhere but to be entirely attentive to what it feels like to walk. Every step is an exercise in non-attachment, in not clinging to anything in the world.

Daily Practice

Spend some time in formal walking meditation. You can go for a walk and practice heightened awareness to the experience, but in formal walking meditation you walk slowly back and forth for 10 or 15 paces in each direction. This frees you from any concern about navigation, obstacles, or distractions, allowing the mind to focus entirely on the flow of physical sensations that come with slowly lifting, moving, and placing the foot with each step.

RIGHT CONCENTRATION Approaching and Abiding in the First Phase of Absorption (1st Jhāna)

Having abandoned the five hindrances, imperfections of the mind that weaken wisdom, quite secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, one enters and abides in the first phase of absorption, which is accompanied by applied thought and sustained thought, with joy and the pleasure born of seclusion. (MN 4) When one sees oneself purified of all these unhealthy states and thus liberated from them, gladness is born. When one is glad, joy is born; in one who is joyful, the body becomes tranquil; one whose body is tranquil feels pleasure; in one who feels pleasure, the mind becomes concentrated. (MN 40)

Reflection

The English word concentration conjures up a sense of deliberate effort, wherein you force yourself to pay attention or to concentrate. While the appropriate application of energy is required, the Buddhist texts talk about concentration as something you relax into naturally, rather than something you force yourself to do through discipline. This sets a very different tone, and makes the practice of concentration more appealing.

Daily Practice

We are used to noticing when we are vexed or afflicted in some way, and are less likely to notice when we are free from distress and feeling good. Try to reverse this today, and notice the times when the mind is free, if only for a moment, from any uncomfortable mental or emotional states. In short, feel good about feeling good when you feel good, and allow yourself to be glad when the mind is clear.

Tomorrow: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Origin of Suffering
One week from today:  Establishing Mindfulness of Feeling and Abiding in the Second Jhāna

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

Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

 

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - March 27, 2022 💌

 

There is a being on another plane that guides, protects, and helps you. That loves you so incredibly. Does your sense of unworthiness prevent you from being loved as much as this being loves you? Unworthiness has to go. You have to be able to say, Christ, God, Baba, let me feel your love. Let me fill up with your love, let me be absorbed into your love.

Breathe in and out of your heart; with each in breath, you take in that love a little more. With each out breath, you get rid of that which keeps you from acknowledging that you are love.

- Ram Dass -

Via FB

 

Via FB

 

Via FB

 

Via Tumblr

 

Via Tumblr

 

Via Tumblr

 

Via FB

 

Via FB

 

Via FB

 

Via FB

 

Via Daily Dharma: Oneness and Multiplicity

 Oneness and multiplicity live together... This is one of the essential points of dharma practice. How can we perceive and express the oneness of everything within the myriad things we encounter?

Shohaku Okumura, “Dogen’s Freeing Verse”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Via Tricycle // 5 Timeless Teachings on Extending Forgiveness to Ourselves and Others

 

5 Timeless Teachings on Extending Forgiveness to Ourselves and Others By The Editors

How can we forgive those who have wronged us—including ourselves? Allow these timeless Buddhist teachings to offer guidance and support on the path to cultivating a merciful heart.

Read more »

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Effort: Restraining Unarisen Unhealthy States

 

RIGHT EFFORT
Restraining Unarisen Unhealthy States

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

Reflection

The fifth of the five hindrances is doubt. This is not the healthy skepticism that encourages us to think for ourselves and not take anything on hearsay. It is the debilitating doubt wherein we are unsure of ourselves and unclear about whether the practice we are doing is well taught or we are practicing it correctly. These sorts of doubts hinder our progress and are better replaced by their opposite, trust and confidence.

Daily Practice

See if you can give some attention to the quality of mind that presents itself when you are doubtful about something and, alternatively, when you are trusting of something. The point is not so much whether the doubt or trust is justified or not, or right or wrong, but rather the effect such attitudes have on the workings of consciousness. Self-doubt in particular undermines the mind, while confidence promotes energy.

Tomorrow: Establishing Mindfulness of Body and Abiding in the First Jhāna
One week from today: Abandoning Arisen Unhealthy States

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

Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

Via Walk With Me // The Art of Grieving Inbox

 

'You Have Enough'

"I have gone to Deer Park every two years that Thay was visiting and during my last visit I asked one of the monks if I could get a personal message from Thay. They asked me what it would be. I said I wanted it to say, 'You Are Enough' in English and Chinese characters as I have an adopted daughter from China and want her to have this one day. He was so kind and said he would ask Thay. I was so hoping to have this piece for my home altar, where I meditate daily. Two days later the monk approached me and said that Thay would get it done by the end of the retreat. We spoke a bit, sharing our background and love for Engaged Buddhism - my heart sang. 

"The day before the retreat concluded the monk said he had my piece, that it was packaged for travel, and I could open it safely once I got home. I was so delighted and excited to see this piece of art and spirit from my teacher of decades. Well, when I got home it was the first thing I attended.

   

"I remember feeling overwhelmed by the sounds around me; adjusting to the lack of silence and calm from the retreat. Even the paper that protected the artwork crinkled in a way that was different, speaking to me in a way I'd not recognized before. When I opened the package I saw Chinese characters and English words. Thay had written, 'You Have Enough' instead of 'You Are Enough'. In my mind's eye, I saw Thay with his impish grin, reminding me of my gifts."

- Lisa Klein

Via White Crane Institute // A.E. HOUSMAN

 This Day in Gay History

March 26

Born

A.E. Housman

1859 -

A.E. HOUSMAN English scholar/poet, born, (d: 1936); Alfred Edward Housman was a classical scholar and poet of note. He was once viewed as a "great grey presence," divorced from the flesh and married to the mind. Young men read A Shropshire Lad and wondered. Was he or wasn’t he? There was no way to find out.

Later, he was painted as a sad recluse, sighing quiet sighs over a straight friend, Moses Jackson, and jerking off the Muse in unrequited love. In this view, Houseman was “in the grip of the ‘cursed trouble’ that soured the wells of his life, produced his poetry, and urged him to the topmost heights of scholarly renown.

Now we learn that the scholarly Cambridge don, far from being “cursed” used to make merry with a string of Venetian gondoliers supplied by his friend Horatio Brown, and was as well a regular patron of the male brothels in Paris. Can it be that the myth of the scholar virgin is just that, a myth?

Because I Liked You

Because I liked you better

     Than suits a man to say,

It irked you, and I promised

     To throw the thought away.

 

To put the world between us

     We parted, stiff and dry;

'Good-bye,' said you, 'forget me.'

     'I will, no fear', said I.

 

If here, where clover whitens

     The dead man's knoll, you pass,

And no tall flower to meet you

     Starts in the trefoiled grass,

 

Halt by the headstone naming

     The heart no longer stirred,

And say the lad that loved you

     Was one that kept his word.

 

A.E. Housman

 

---

|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|

Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute

"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson

Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org

|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|