Sunday, May 29, 2022

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - May 29, 2022 💌

 

If I can’t stop thinking, maybe I can just let my thoughts go by without getting all caught up in them. Feel the breeze on your face or your neck? See how it’s going by? You’re not all hung up with it. You don’t have to see where each breeze goes. You don’t have to look quickly to see if it hit those trees over there. It’s breezes, and they’re just going by. Make your thoughts like those breezes, those little breezes...just going by.

- Ram Dass -

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Mindfulness and Concentration: Establishing Mindfulness of Feeling and the Second Jhāna

RIGHT MINDFULNESS
Establishing Mindfulness of Feeling
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 feeling a mental pleasant feeling, one is aware: “Feeling a mental pleasant feeling”… one is just aware, just mindful: “There is feeling.” And one abides not clinging to anything in the world. (MN 10)
Reflection
We forget sometimes that it is okay to feel joy. In fact, it is encouraged. It is attachment to joy that is a problem, not the good feeling that comes with mental pleasure. The aggregate of feeling, which includes both physical pleasure and pain and mental pleasure and pain, is an inevitable and natural aspect of all experience. The challenge is to experience pleasure with equanimity, rather than with desire.

Daily Practice
Just as you can find both pleasure and pain when you review bodily sensations, the same is true of mental life. Take a few moments to inventory the contents of your mind. Certain things you think of are accompanied by happiness, while others arise with mental pain. Allow yourself to experience mental pleasure when it arises, and carefully observe the inevitable tipping point when the mind becomes attached to that pleasure.


RIGHT CONCENTRATION
Approaching and Abiding in the Second Phase of Absorption (2nd Jhāna)
With the stilling of applied and sustained thought, one enters upon and abides in the second phase of absorption, which has inner clarity and singleness of mind, without applied thought and sustained thought, with joy and the pleasure born of concentration. (MN 4)

Breathing in short, one is aware: ‘I breathe in short’; or
breathing out short, one is aware: ‘I breathe out short.
This is how concentration by mindfulness of breathing is developed and cultivated, 
so that it is of great fruit and great benefit. (SN 54.8)

Tomorrow: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Cessation of Suffering
One week from today: Establishing Mindfulness of Mind and Abiding in the Third Jhāna

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

Questions?
Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

 

Via Daily Dharma: Coming and Going

 When we really get a feeling for the coming and going of moments, it helps us break the illusion of a solid, separate self, which gives us relief from suffering.
    
Loch Kelly, “When Am I?”


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Saturday, May 28, 2022

9 foreign gay movies must watch

50 New Gay Movies of 2020

Via Facebook

 


BHNN Guest Podcast – Ep. 104 – Ram Dass Fellowship: Hungry Ghosts w/ John Lockley

 In this BHNN Guest Podcast, get ready for some spiritual nourishment from John Lockley as he guides us in healing our hungry ghosts. After, he has a discussion with Jackie Dobrinska on devotion, ancestors, and other audience questions. In this BHNN Guest Podcast, get ready for some spiritual nourishment from John Lockley as he guides us in healing our hungry ghosts. After,...

Via L.A. Times

 

Ellen DeGeneres, hosting the Academy Awards in March 2014, gathers celebrities in the audience for a selfie.(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
DeGeneres would, in short, become perhaps the most famous LGBTQ person in America, Oscar host and rival to Oprah, icon, omnipresence, eminence — and in so doing carry the banner of queer representation that she held aloft on “Ellen” into a new and more hopeful century.
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The Lion’s Roar Podcast: Anxiety and What to Do About It with Bruce Tift

 

The Lion’s Roar Podcast: Anxiety and What to Do About It with Bruce Tift

This episode of The Lion’s Roar Podcast features psychotherapist and author Bruce Tift.
Anxiety can be a pretty reasonable response to times of wide spread disease, environmental disaster, social unrest and polarization. Associate editor Chris Pacheco talks to Bruce Tift, psychotherapist and author of Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation, about attempting to control feelings of anxiety, why that only makes it worse, and what to do instead.
 

Via Lion´s Roar

 

Smile at Fear: Pema Chodron on Bravery, Open Heart & Basic Goodness

If you want to pitch in and help solve the world’s problems, says Pema Chödrön, you’ve got to start with yourself. Here’s her advice for making friends with the fear that can hold us back.
If we come to the understanding that we are needed and commit ourselves to doing something about our own pain and the pain around us, we will find that we are on a journey. A warrior is always on a journey, and a main feature of that journey is fear. This fear is not simply something to be lamented, avoided, or vanquished. It is something to be examined, something to make a relationship with.
 

Via Daily Dharma: Practice Without Goal

 A goalless practice is about being right here in each moment without any conceptual objective in mind. It means putting the brakes on constantly doing, and starting to just be in the world as you are.

Anthony Tshering, “How the Concept of Impermanence Can Help Anxiety-Ridden Millennials”


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Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Effort: Abandoning Arisen Unhealthy States

RIGHT EFFORT
Abandoning Arisen 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)

Abandoning worldly sense desire, one abides with a mind free from sense desire, one purifies the mind of sense desire. (MN 51) Just as a person who had taken a loan would pay off their debts and have money left over, so would one rejoice and be glad about the abandoning of sense desire. (DN 2)
Reflection
When an unhealthy state arises, what do you do? First, acknowledge it rather than try to ignore or suppress it, and then understand that it is unhealthy and likely to bring harm to yourself and/or others. Finally, let it go. Letting it go is simply aligning yourself with the law of impermanence. All mental and emotional states will pass away naturally; the trick is not to encourage the unhealthy ones by getting caught by them.

Daily Practice
Practice experiencing a stream of sensory inputs—sights, sounds, and the rest—without being entangled in them. When you abide in your experience with equanimity rather than desire or aversion, you are free. Even if these moments are brief, they are compared in this text to the freedom of being liberated from debt. The mind is unencumbered, without anxiety, and feels light and at ease. This feels good.

Tomorrow: Establishing Mindfulness of Feeling and Abiding in the Second Jhāna
One week from today: Developing Unarisen Healthy States

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

Questions?
Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

 

Via The Tricycle Community


Past Lives, Present Issues
bell hooks Interviewed by Helen Tworkov
In a 1992 interview with Tricycle’s founder, Helen Tworkov, the writer and social critic bell hooks offered a rare glimpse into her relationship with Buddhism.
Read more »

 

Friday, May 27, 2022

Via Tumblr

 


Shurastey

 

 

https://nypost.com/2022/05/25/brazilian-man-on-dream-us-road-trip-killed-with-dog-by-his-side/amp/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-2694271/Video-Brazilian-influencer-dies-car-accident-finishes-trip-dog.html

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Living: Abstaining from Taking What is Not Given

 

RIGHT LIVING
Undertaking the Commitment to Abstain from Taking What is Not Given
Taking what is not given is unhealthy. Refraining from taking what is not given is healthy. (MN 9) Abandoning the taking of what is not given, one abstains from taking what is not given; one does not take by way of theft the wealth and property of others. (MN 41) One practices thus: “Others may take what is not given, but I will abstain from taking what is not given.” (MN 8)

On seeing a form with the eye, one does not grasp at its signs and features. Since if one left the eye faculty unguarded, unwholesome states of covetousness and grief might intrude, one practices the way of its restraint, one guards the eye faculty, one undertakes the restraint of the eye faculty. (MN 51)
Reflection
This is not a practice for shutting out the world but for gaining some control over what enters and influences your mind. Just as you don’t eat everything that you encounter, so also you need not see, hear, touch, or think everything that is capable of being discerned. Some objects impinge on the senses with such force that they cannot be ignored, but most of what we experience we seek out, driven by desire. We need not do this.

Daily Practice
Even with visual experience, we do not always have to take in more than what is immediately presented to the eye. Practice seeing something, acknowledging it, and then letting it pass away without chasing after its details and associations. We can take what is given to sight, and only what is given, and then move on to the next moment. In this way we are not dragged into entanglements we don’t choose, and we remain free.

Tomorrow: Abandoning Arisen Unhealthy States
One week from today: Abstaining from Misbehaving Among Sensual Pleasures

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

Questions?
Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

Via Daily Dharma: Compassion Through Acceptance

 The power of acceptance can’t be overestimated. Accepting the basic fact of the suffering and pain we witness, and remaining willing to experience it, is what allows us to access our innate capacities for compassion.

Fleet Maull, “From Empathy to Compassion”


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Thursday, May 26, 2022

Via Tumblr


 

The violence in the US this month — the killing of African-American elders at a grocery store, Asian elders worshiping in their church, and 19 small children and two of their teachers in their elementary school classrooms — has elicited so much pain and grief. For many, it has also elicited a new or renewed determination to try to make this a better world. For others, well, for now it’s just exhaustion.

We invite you to join us this Friday, May 27, at 7:00 PM ET to hold space for our collective, whatever we feel, and offer metta to all who are suffering.


With lovingkindness,
All of us at IMS


Register Here
This is a free event. Open to all.