Lynn J Kelly offers another provocative post on how important it is to question the stories we tell ourselves and then let them go.
Mindfulness can help us deal with our disappointments and faulty expectations. Check out the link below for more information.
The article below reminds me of the scouting practice to “always leave a place better than you found it,” meaning that we treat our environment and those around us with respect and care.
May your day and this holiday season be filled with joy and wisdom.
Wearing my heart on my sleeve, I’ve become a human porcupine, the pain too intense to hide ….
Tibetan-American poet and writer, Lekey Leidecker, helps us recognize the anxiety we now experience. Provocative phrases such as those below are from her recent Tricycle article, Some Things Are Felt Through the Body:
Check out this heartfelt article at tricycle.org/article/lekey-leidecker-body/
Statue of Buddha at Magnolia Grove Monastery – picture taken by Patrick Cole
Spirituality + Health online magazine has shared another helpful article written by Victor M. Parachin. Highlights can be found below. For the full article see: https://www.spiritualityhealth.com/authors/victor-m-parachin-m-div-c-y-t
How to Find Inner Peace—the Buddhist Way
“Buddhism identifies inner peace as a sense of emotional, mental, and spiritual harmony, even as life’s challenges arise. When inner peace is present, there are strong feelings of serenity, balance, tranquility, and calmness. Here are some Buddhist methods of attaining inner peace:
The Dalai Lama notes that whenever negative emotions such as anxiety, anger, worry, or fear emerge, “We need some countermeasures to oppose them. For example, if we are too hot, we reduce the temperature, or if we want to remove darkness, there’s no other way than bringing light.”
When you’re feeling impoverished, practice gratitude; when you’re feeling sad, smile at every person you encounter; when you’re experiencing guilt, be extra kind to others; when you’re feeling discouraged, recall and savor what is good and right in your life.”
In 20 days, another American election will take place. As always, there’s a lot of free-floating angst in our culture. How might we prepare for whatever outcomes arise?
Tricycle magazine offers a great article today on how best to deal with greed, hatred and delusion. It’s a summary of the twelve links of Dependent Origination written by Joseph Goldstein.
Remember to vote and check out these helpful and nonpartisan links below:
My first father-in-law taught me how to fly fish. He never used the quote, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” He did, however, patiently offer suggestions and examples of how to do something if I was really interested in learning. No pressure, no expectations, just answering questions and role-modeling techniques. Maybe he was communicating nonverbally, “Come follow me, or don’t, it’s your choice.”
Two articles crossed my path today. Perhaps they will be as provocative for you as they were for me.
They are:
“Maimonides, a renowned philosopher and scholar, once wisely said, ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.’ This timeless quote encapsulates the profound notion that providing immediate help to someone may alleviate their immediate needs but teaching them the skills to become self-sufficient will empower them for a lifetime.” http://www.socratic-method.com/quote-meanings-and-interpretations/maimonides-give-a-man-a-fish-and-you-feed-him-for-a-day-teach-a-man-to-fish-and-you-feed-him-for-a-lifetime
“When one is deluded, one thinks teachers take you, but when one has awakened, one realizes that one crosses over by oneself.” tricycle.org/article/nelson-foster-chan-buddhism/
Like dominoes falling, it’s interesting to see how one thought leads to another … or not.
Lion’s Roar online magazine shares a full article on How to Break the Chains of Thought. Below are a few excerpts for your consideration. For the full article, go to http://www.lionsroar.com/break-the-chains-of-thought
When you study your thought process, … you see how it rules your life. In the breaks and gaps between thoughts, you can experience awakened mind on the spot.
Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche 8 September 2024
We are all citizens of the Information Age, when attention-consuming data is abundant and human attention itself is regarded as a scarce commodity. In the noise and chaos of this flood of information, how often do you notice where your mind is and what it’s doing? …
The starting point for discovering the true nature or reality of your mind is just this awareness of thoughts. When you can see these patterns clearly, that’s the beginning of discovering the sanity and wakefulness within your own mind. …
Chaos and sanity coexist—they depend on each other. Without insanity, there is no sanity. So please don’t worry about your thoughts and the chaos of your mind. They can serve as the basis of your transformation.
When you look at your thoughts and emotions, the starting point is very important. It’s like chaos theory, which looks at the dynamics of highly sensitive systems. A very small change at the outset or starting point of a motion makes the system behave completely differently, and that very small change can make a big difference after a while. An often quoted example in popular culture is the “butterfly effect,” in which a butterfly flapping its wings in the forests of Brazil could cause a hurricane in the East China Sea.
It’s the same with thoughts. You may have just a glimmer of a judgmental thought about someone. It seems so small and harmless. But that tiny thought has the potential to intensify and color your next thought, and the next, in the end triggering deep-rooted habitual patterns that have a big effect. …
The interesting thing here is that within the seeming chaos or randomness of our thoughts, there are patterns, including how our thoughts and emotions interact. … thoughts are viewed as always at play with our emotional energies, driving them one way or the other. …
We have so many thoughts—positive thoughts, negative thoughts, coarse thoughts, subtle thoughts—but when you look directly and closely at any thought, or any emotion, perception, or appearance of mind at all, what do you see?
The first thing you see is that the thought you’re looking at disappears. As soon as you think, “Oh, there is a thought, I am going to look at it,” it is gone. And after the thought is gone, then what do you see?
Between the dissolving of one thought and the arising of the next, there is a gap, an open space. When a thought arises, it’s there for just a moment, then starts to dissolve. When it dissolves, there is a clear, open space where there’s nothing happening until the next thought. If we can totally let go, rest, and relax, then that point where thoughts vanish is where we will find our natural liberation, our genuinely awakened heart.
With these momentary gaps, our chaotic thoughts are being quite kind, offering to give us a break and a chance for awakening. But usually we don’t take that opportunity. We run right over it. We are attached to our busy, workaholic pattern that keeps us moving on to the next thought, the next moment, the next experience. That’s one of the main patterns of our mind—to always be moving, instead of pausing and resting where we are, even for a moment.
Although thoughts are momentary, it feels like our mind is always thinking. That’s because we don’t notice the gaps. We create the illusion of continuity by linking thoughts together seamlessly, so they have a feeling of permanence and oneness.
... each momentary thought is like a link in a chain that connects to another link in the chain, and so on. Who knows where the chain began or where it will end? At some point, without even knowing it, we’ve created a chain that effectively binds us. We are a captive of our own thoughts. Positive thoughts we attach to may create a pretty golden chain, but we are still bound.
To accomplish our aims, it’s important for us to have a good understanding of our thoughts and how the patterns they form blind and control us. …
When you can see the full display and just let it go, there is liberation right there. Not liberation in a religious sense, but simple freedom from being controlled by your thoughts. You don’t have to take this on faith. You can discover it yourself. As you get closer to it, you can feel it, and then finally you can see it.
Most of all in this process, we need to have a genuine measure of compassion for ourselves and others. Even if it’s just a little, it can still have a profound and far-reaching effect, like the flapping of the wings of our butterfly. …
Seeing these patterns, we get to know our mind so that it works better for us and helps us to achieve our goals in this life. …
We see that thoughts are momentary, arising and then dissolving, and in the open space between them we can discover awakened mind on the spot.
Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche is the author of several books including, most recently, Emotional Rescue: How to Work with Your Emotions to Transform Hurt and Confusion into Energy That Empowers You.
“mindfulness is a means for overcoming craving.“
Below are highlights of a recent Tricycle article on Cutting the Roots of Craving. I have three of Gunaratana’s books now and the provocative excerpt below comes from his latest book co-written by Veronique Ziegler.
May the words below offer some helpful advice to overcome our addiction for “more.”
Desire is beginningless. Yet through right mindfulness we can learn to abandon it. By Bhante Henepola Gunaratana and Veronique Ziegler Jul 18, 2024
Everything we do pivots around craving and Its insatiability is such that it yields more craving
whenever we ask ourselves the question “Am I satisfied?” we always get the same answer: “Not yet.”
There is no point in time before which a state of desirelessness can be found.
in dependence upon feeling, there is craving.
Everything happens in your mind. When you talk, write, perform any deed whatsoever, watch your mind at all times in order to guard it against defilements and prevent craving from invading it.
Look at your own mind to see the invisible greed, anger, jealousy, and all the other defilements that are the real cause of your suffering.
If you end greed now, you attain liberation now. If you end greed one minute later, you attain liberation one minute later. If you end greed tomorrow, you attain liberation tomorrow.
Craving can be found in our very own mind. Understanding it is a personal exploration that must be undertaken individually, for the solution to abandon it is also in our own minds.
there is a great danger in sensual pleasures—not that they cause immediate harm or risk to one’s life (although some sensory pleasures can definitely be lethal) but that sense enjoyments are impermanent. And because they are impermanent they can never be satisfactory.
to live a happy and healthy life. We must use our senses, but we must do so with wisdom,
Mindfulness is a means for overcoming craving.
© 2024 by Bhante Gunaratana and Veronique Ziegler, Dependent Origination in Plain English. Reprinted by arrangement with Wisdom Publications.
Bhante Henepola Gunaratana is a Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka and the author of Mindfulness in Plain English. He is president of the Bhavana Society in High View, West Virginia, an organization that promotes meditation and monastic life.
Veronique Ziegler earned her doctorate degree in experimental high-energy physics from the University of Iowa working on the BaBar experiment at SLAC National Laboratory in Menlo Park, California. She then took a research assistant position at the same lab and later a staff scientist position at Jefferson National Laboratory in Newport News, Virginia, where she currently works full time and is involved in the lab particle spectroscopy experimental program. In 2018, she started attending Bhante Gunaratana’s dhamma classes. She has been an avid dhamma student ever since.
“In the long run, both a peaceful mind and harmonious behavior are essential. Cultivating the mind will eventually lead to cultivating ethical behavior, and cultivating ethical behavior will support cultivating the mind. This is likely to be an iterative process rather than first one thing then the other.”
Lynn J Kelly does it again!
Check out the link below for another informative and provocative post.
We are a composite of all the influences we accept. Through nature and nurture, we look at life through the filters we’ve inherited and acquired.
The work of two artists converges into a message and an earworm guiding me this morning.
The first is today’s meditation from Henri Nouwen on seeing truth, love and beauty in our everyday lives. The second is a Del Reeves song reminding us to appreciate what we have because we will lose it if we don’t take care of it. Together they remind me how fortunate I am.
Here’s hoping one or both offer something to you.
henrinouwen.org/meditation/
What We’re Looking for is Already Here
We discover that cleaning and cooking, writing letters and doing professional work, visiting people and caring for others, are not a series of random events that prevent us from realizing our deepest self. It is the right time, the real moment, the chance of our lives.
genius.com/Del-reeves-be-glad-lyrics
Be glad you’ve got what you’ve got when you’ve got it
Or you’re gonna find out what you’ve got is gone
Take care what you do when you do if you do it
If you don’t you won’t have your baby long
Everybody envies you, you lucky so and so
You should thank your lucky stars above
You’d better treat her better you’d better start right now
She deserves the best that you can do
She does everything for you the best that she knows how
That’s the least she can expect from you
Life Matters 