What does unconditional love look like? Below are two of the four fur friends I walked yesterday in downtown St. Louis.
Aeshma – 2yr old female Terrier 51lbs.
Tic Tac – 7yr old female Terrier 55 lbs.
I also walked two males, Orville and Skidmore, but forgot to take pictures. Next time.
All four dogs are beautiful creatures and I feel so lucky to walk with them. My greatest wish is that they are adopted soon so that they can be with a loving human seven days a week.
Today’s pupryu: Fur Friends
greeted so warmly
trusted so quickly – I’m awed
by the love you give
Check with your local animal rescue facility for some unconditional love opportunities.
Below is a repost of a Lion’s Roar article written by Br. Phap Hai. It’s a great introduction to the basics of bowing. May this bring you comfort and peace today.
When we bow to another person, says Brother Phap Hai, we honor both their goodness and our own.
In the famed Lotus Sutra, there is a wonderful chapter in which we meet a bodhisattva named Never Despising. His practice was not doing long hours of sitting meditation, chanting the sutras, or reciting mantras. Upon seeing another person, he would put his palms together, bow, and say, “You will become a buddha one day!” This was bodhisattva Never Despising’s only practice.
One of the first things that made an impression on me when I visited a traditional Buddhist temple was seeing practitioners join their palms in front of their heart when they met each other. I immediately felt a sense of respect and sacredness, not only toward the shrine but toward each other.
The practice of bowing, whether as a physical or mental practice, helps us connect with others as human beings who are just like us in their search for happiness and peace. For me, bowing to another person is a practice of touching what is real and alive—within me and within them. Doesn’t that sound like the heart of meditation?
Recently, a practitioner asked me about the benefits of meditation. I knew that she was hoping I would talk about dazzling lights, profound insights, or psychic powers. Perhaps to her disappointment, I shared with her my growing sense of appreciation for the ordinary moments of my life—a cup of tea in the morning, warm sunshine, laughter. Before, I had taken these things as a given rather than a gift. Now as I practice more, my experience of them has become richer, deeper, and more meaningful.
When I reflect in this way, even inanimate objects become dear, dear friends on the path. Whenever I sit down in the meditation hall, I bow to my cushion because it is a very kind friend to my buttocks and lower back. Practicing in this way, I experience a lot of joy and gratitude.
Within the confines of a monastery or practice center, I will physically bow to others, but sometimes I find myself in situations where that might be thought strange. In that case, rather than focusing on the physical act of joining my palms, I do a mental bowing practice. I simply open myself to the other person and touch the realness within both of us.
Perhaps the greatest advice I ever received in my spiritual life was when a senior meditation teacher told me that as Buddhists we should always avoid “covering things over with a whole lot of bells and incense. Just be yourself, truly yourself.”
The act of joining our palms and bowing is first of all a physical practice, but most importantly it is a moment of mental stopping and recognition. Here are some different ways that you can practice bowing:
On the most basic level, one practice of bowing is to look into the eyes of another person and gently bring your palms together in front of your heart. You might bend slightly at the waist or bow your head in respect.
When we join our palms in front of another person, we are recognizing the essential quality of goodness in ourselves and in them. That is truly a moment of celebration. When somebody joins their palms in front of me, I feel as if a mirror is being held up to me. In it, I see who I truly am. It is always a powerful moment.
Another practice is to visualize your hands as a lotus flower. As you join your palms together in front of your heart, make an offering to the buddha in front of you. You might find it helpful to recite silently the following gatha: “A lotus for you, a buddha-to-be.”
Bowing can also be a mental practice. Too often we fail to appreciate the ordinary moments of our life. Bring your awareness to encounters with people whom you might normally overlook—the person at the checkout counter, the people in line with you at the airport. Stop and take a moment to recognize the person in front of you. With soft eyes and an open heart, send them your respect and appreciation. Mentally bow to the true nature of goodness you share.
Originally from Australia, Brother Phap Hai is a senior student of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. Prior to becoming a monk, he trained as a chef. Brother Phap Hai is known for his ability to convey complex teachings in an accessible and humorous manner and leads retreats and workshops throughout the United States, Canada, South America, Australia, and Asia. He currently resides at Deer Park Monastery, in California, where he breathes, walks, and smiles on a regular basis. He is the author of Nothing to It: Ten Ways to Be at Home with Yourself.
Love takes work from both parties in a relationship. Making dreams come true for the two of you keeps passion alive. Be – Do – Have.
Today’s senryu: Keep Putting Things into Your Future
making memories
creating joy together
keep the dream alive
“Everybody wants to have great relationships. But unfortunately, when it comes to relationships, we spend so much time rooted in the past that we hardly notice that joy is possible in the present moment. Many of us are addicted to courtship, because when you’re in the courtship phase, you’re all lit up about the future. We’re going to be together, we’re going to have a great relationship, it’s going to be awesome. That sense of what’s “going to be” fuels your joy and excitement in the present moment. So you’re making plans, you’re doing all kinds of fun things, you’re all pumped up. Then you get married, and it all stops.
What stopped? The idea that your future could be more exciting than your present. The future is the fuel for the joy in the present moment, and once you’ve “arrived” – you’ve got the wedding ring on your finger, you’ve got the money in the bank, or whatever other future you were shooting for – all of a sudden the air goes out of the balloon. Why? Because you’re no longer creating from the future. You’ve achieved your goal and you start to coast. I hate to say it, but you can only coast one way – downhill.
In a relationship, if the future is the fuel because you’re so excited about what you’re going to do, then keep on putting things into your future that light both of you up.” Raise Your HDL: Healthy Deserve Level by Gary Kadi, (c) 2009, p.35
What does it mean to take refuge in the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha? It’s a repeated refrain in the Pali canon that the path to freedom starts with having faith in the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha – what does that mean for us?
The Buddha was a historical person who led an extraordinary life and accomplished, through his own physical and mental efforts, a goal that many have since pursued. But believing those facts is not the same as understanding their implications. We have to start by understanding, or at least thinking it’s possible, that each of us is imbued with deep psychological roots that are both selfish and unselfish, cruel and kind, wilfully ignorant and that incline towards wisdom. In Buddhist language these are the roots of greed, hatred, and delusion, along with their opposites: generosity, unselfish (even unbounded) love, and clarity and wisdom. If we observe our own…
“The ads for “The Sterile Cuckoo” remind us that you can fall in love for the first time only once in your life. True enough, but that begs the question of whether Pookie and Jerry are really in love. I doubt it. Their relationship is based more on need: her need to be loved, and his need to make love.” Thus begins the critical movie review by Roger Ebert, the late Pulitzer-Prize winning movie critic who died in 2013. See the full review here: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-sterile-cuckoo-1969
I was a movie reviewer for both my high school and college newspapers. I still enjoy watching movies, especially classics, but stopped writing movie reviews long ago. I was more of a promoter than a critic and definitely not as talented a writer as Roger Ebert. Alas.
Liza Minnelli and the song, Come Saturday Morning, were nominated for Oscars, although neither won. Alas.
“Simply pray for what’s best, realizing that you may not know what that is.”
Below is a repost from a thoughtful Tricycle archive article. Regardless of your personal faith tradition, I hope this article offers you some provocative thoughts on what prayer means to you.
Why do we pray? We might think that if we do, the Buddha, or God, or a deity will look kindly upon us, bestow blessings, protect us. We might believe that if we don’t, the deity won’t like us, might even punish us. But the purpose of prayer is not to win the approval or avert the wrath of an exterior God.
To the extent that we understand Buddha, God, the deity, to be an expression of ultimate reality, to that extent we receive blessings when we pray. To the extent that we have faith in the boundless qualities of the deity’s love and compassion, to that extent we receive the blessings of those qualities.
Sometimes we project human characteristics onto things that aren’t human. For example, if we sentimentally think, “My dog is meditating with me,” we’re only attributing that behavior to the dog; we’re imagining what it’s doing. When we anthropomorphize God, we project our own faults and limitations, imagining they’re God’s as well. This is why many people believe that God either likes or dislikes them depending on their behavior. “I won’t be able to have this or that because God doesn’t like me—I forgot to pray.” Or worse, “If God doesn’t like me, I’ll end up in hell.”
If God feels happy or sad because we do or do not offer prayer, then God is not flawless, not an embodiment of perfect compassion and love. Any manifestation of the absolute truth, by its very nature, has neither attachment to our prayers nor aversion to our lack of them. Such attributes are projections of our own mind.
To understand how prayer works, consider the sun, which shines everywhere without hesitation or hindrance. Like God or Buddha, it continuously radiates all its power, warmth, and light without differentiation. When the earth turns, it appears to us that the sun no longer shines. But that has nothing to do with the sun; it’s due to our own position on the shadow side of the earth. If we inhabit a deep, dark mine shaft, it’s not the sun’s fault that we feel cold. Or if we live on the earth’s surface but keep our eyes closed, it’s not the sun’s fault that we don’t see light. The sun’s blessings are all-pervasive, whether we are open to them or not. Through prayer, we come out of the mine shaft, open our eyes, become receptive to enlightened presence, the omnipotent love and compassion that exist for all beings.
Even if we aren’t familiar with the idea of praying to a deity, most of us feel the presence of some higher principle or truth—some source of wisdom, compassion, and power with the ability to benefit. Praying to that higher principle will without doubt be fruitful.
However, it is very important not to be small-minded in prayer. You might want to pray for a new car, but how do you know if a new car is what you need? It’s better to simply pray for what’s best, realizing that you may not know what that is. A few years ago, a Tibetan woman traveled overseas by airplane. When the plane made a brief stop en route, she got out to walk around. Unfamiliar with the airport, with the language, and with foreign travel, she didn’t hear the announcement of her departing flight and missed it. This probably seemed disastrous at the time, but not long after takeoff the plane that she missed crashed, killing most of the passengers.
We pray for what’s best not only for ourselves, but for all beings. When we’re just starting practice, our self-importance is often so strong that our prayers remain very selfish and only reinforce rather than transform self-centeredness. So until our motivation becomes more pure-hearted, it may be beneficial to spend more time cultivating lovingkindness than praying.
With proper motivation, prayer becomes an important component of our practice because it helps to remove obstacles—counterproductive circumstances, imbalances of the subtle energies in the body, confusion and ignorance in the mind. Even in listening to the teachings, we may mentally edit what we hear, adding more to them than is being said or ignoring certain aspects. Prayer offsets these hindrances.
The mind is like a mirror. Although our true nature is the deity, what we now experience are ordinary mind’s reflections. Enemies, hindrances, inauspicious moments—all of which appear to be outside of us—are actually reflections of our own negativities. If you’ve never seen your image before, looking in a mirror you’d think you were gazing through a window, encountering someone altogether independent of you. It wouldn’t seem to have any connection to you as you passed by. If you saw there a horrible-looking person with a dirty face and wild hair, you might feel aversion. You might even try to clean up the image by washing the mirror. But a mirror, like the mind, is reflective—it only shows you yourself. Only if you combed your hair and washed your face could you change what you saw. You’d have to change yourself; you couldn’t change the mirror. Prayer helps to purify the habits of ordinary, small mind and ignorance of our true nature as the deity.
When we pray in the context of deity practice, we sometimes visualize the deity standing or sitting before us in space as an embodiment of perfection, whereas we ourselves have many faults and obscurations. But praying to the deity is not a matter of supplicating something separate from ourselves. The point of using a dualistic method, visualizing the deity outside of us, is to eliminate duality.
When we visualize ourselves as the deity, we deepen our experience of our own intrinsic purity. Finally, in the completion stage of practice, when the form of the deity falls away, we let the mind rest, without effort or contrivance, in its own nature, the ultimate deity.
Thus we begin with an initial conception of purity as external, only to internalize it and ultimately to transcend concepts of inner and outer. This awareness of the nature of the deity increases the power, blessings, and benefit of our prayer.
If the nature of the deity is emptiness, you might wonder why we pray at all. There seems to be a contradiction here. How can we say, on the one hand, that there isn’t a deity, only the reflection of our own intrinsic nature, and, on the other, that we should pray to it? This makes sense only if we understand the inseparability of absolute and relative truth.
On the absolute level, our nature is buddha, we are the deity. But unaware of this, we’re bound by relative truth. In order to make the leap to the realization of our absolute nature, we have to walk on our relative feet, on a relative path. Because absolute truth is so elusive to our ordinary, linear mind, we rely on an increasingly subtle, step-by-step process to work with the mind’s duality until we achieve recognition. Prayer is an essential part of that process.
Red Tara Dedication Prayer
Red Tara is one of Chagdud Tulku’s root practices, which he and his Sangha use daily.
Throughout my many lives and until this moment, whatever virtue I have accomplished, including the merit generated by this practice, and all that I, will ever attain, this I offer for the welfare of sentient beings.
May sickness, war, famine, and suffering be decreased for every being, while their wisdom and compassion increase in this and every future life.
May I clearly perceive all experiences to be as insubstantial as the dream fabric of the night and instantly awaken to perceive the pure wisdom display in the arising of every phenomenon.
May I quickly attain enlightenment in order to work ceaselessly for the liberation of all sentient beings.
Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche (1930–2002) was a highly revered meditation master, artist, Tibetan physician and the spiritual director of the Chagdud Gonpa Foundation.
So what? Well, here are the consequences of loneliness according to a recent advisory from the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy :
“you can feel lonely even if you have a lot of people around you, because loneliness is about the quality of your connections.”
the physical consequences of poor connection can be devastating, including a 29% increased risk of heart disease; a 32% increased risk of stroke; and a 50% increased risk of developing dementia for older adults
many young people now use social media as a replacement for in-person relationships, and this often meant lower-quality connections.
U.S. participation in community organizations — from faith groups to recreational leagues — has declined in recent decades.
A 2022 paper from Johns Hopkins University also found socially isolated older adults had a higher chance of developing dementia than their peers. “Social connections matter for our cognitive health, and the risk of social isolation is potentially modifiable for older adults,”
Today’s senryu: Lookin’ for Love in All the Wrong Places
Last week during a 5-day meditation retreat that I and 300 others attended, a special small group consultation session was offered to “anyone who has experienced trauma OR knows someone who has experienced trauma.” Duh! Crowd murmuring began immediately with the gist being: wouldn’t that include everyone here, if not everyone on the planet.
While first or second-hand trauma seem part of our times, does that mean we should “wallow in misery”?
A Healthline article, How to Identify and Deal with a Victim Mentality, written by Crystal Raypole (see http://www.healthline.com/health/victim-mentality), offers a lot of information on this malady. Here are a couple of highlights:
“The victim mentality rests on three key beliefs: Bad things happen and will keep happening. Other people or circumstances are to blame. Any efforts to create change will fail, so there’s no point in trying.
People identify with the victim role when they “veer into the belief that everyone else caused their misery and nothing they do will ever make a difference.”
A victim mentality can be distressing and create challenges, both for those living with it and the people in their lives. But it can be overcome with the help of a therapist, as well as plenty of compassion and self-kindness.”
Life Matters 