#658 Favorite Meditation Practice?

     Senior meditation teacher, Sylvia Boorstein, uses:

               "'May I meet this moment fully; may I meet it as a friend,'

     as a tool for cultivating concentration in formal practice and as a response throughout the day to moments of 
     challenge.'"

        Shambhala Sun, May 2015                      www.lionsroar.com/category/shambhala-sun/

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#657 You Can Count on Goodness

     "... consistently demonstrated in many domains of research: that daily human life is not characterized by violence, exploitation, or indifference. Far from it. The research ... reveals that we care deeply for one another, and that we would rather help our fellow beings than not. Even more, the science shows that refusing to help others can have debilitating, long-term mental and physical consequences for ourselves. Isolation hurts, physically; so does aggression. Every angry word we utter fries neurons and wears out our hearts.

      ... research currently suggests: If you want to find and foster the good in society, you need to start by searching for the goodness inside yourself."

       Jeremy Adam Smith, "You Can Count On Goodness" Shambhala Sun, May 2015     greatergood.berkeley.edu

#656 Suffering - Results Guaranteed

     “We can guarantee ourselves suffering when we cling to a desire for things to be different than they are. We can practically define suffering by saying that it is clinging to that desire. 
      Things are not different than they are. They are as they are.

      Wanting things to change is not the same as putting out the effort and determination to bring about change.”

        The author and his wife barely survived a fiery plane crash, and underwent a long, painful period of rehabilitation for extensive burns and other injuries. He wrote the book “Through the Flames” chronicling their journey. 
       Allan Lokos “The Miraculous Body” Shambhala Sun, May 2015.

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#655 Directly Experiencing What Is

     “… we have to drop our attachment to mental categories; then the true meaning can infuse us.”

     Tanahashi K, Chayat RS. “Endless Vow. The Zen Path of Soen Nakagawa.” Shambhala, Boston, 1996. 

#654 Even More Craving & Avoidance Won't Get You There, Sorry ...

      “Obsessing about getting what you want, and avoiding what you don’t want, does not result in happiness.” 
                              Pema Chodron
 
     “The ‘secret’ of life that we are all looking for is just this: to develop through sitting and daily life practice the power and courage to return to that which we have spent a lifetime hiding from, to rest in the bodily experience of the present moment – even if it is a feeling of being humiliated, of failing, of abandonment, of unfairness.”
                              Charlotte Joko Beck

     “Your true home is wakefulness. Go home!”
                              Ashin Tejaniya

 

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#653 Awareness Leads to Spaciousness & Freedom

     “Change will happen naturally as we open to the truth. The more we bring our attachments into awareness, the freer we become, not because we eliminate the attachments, but because we learn to identify more with awareness than with desire. Using our capacity for consciousness, we can change perspective on ourselves, giving a sense of space where once there was only habit. Discipline means restraining the habitual movement of the mind, so that instead of blind impulse there can be clear comprehension. 
     In our quest to understand where our unsatisfactoriness derives from, we are often inclined to search for causes and people to blame. … the search for causes has to lead eventually back to the individual. Although traumatic and terrible things may have occurred, it is the individual’s mind that perpetuates the suffering, and that can be trained to change. As long as we are struggling against the feeling, hoping to eliminate it by getting high or being cured, we are still attached. We can relieve unsatisfactoriness only by sharpening our focus and changing our perspective.”

        Epstein M. "Going on Being. Buddhism and the way of Change. A Positive Psychology for the West." Broadway Books, NY, 2001. 

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#652 Life's Difficulties AS Initiation

     “Life will initiate you. It will, in all it’s ways. It will make you face praise & blame, gain & loss, pleasure & pain, and joy & sorrow - it’s what it’s woven of. But to take it as an initiation, means to not avert your gaze, to not close your heart to the sorrows of the world, but to say ‘Yes, this has been given to me, and I will take this – the war that’s been given, the death, the injustice that’s the measure I’ve been given – and make something that is beautiful, some understanding or dignity out it.'
     As the Sufis say ‘Overcome any bitterness because you are not up to the magnitude of the pain that was entrusted to you. Like the mother of the world who carries the pain or the sorrows of the world in her heart, you are each endowed with a certain measure of cosmic pain, you are called upon to meet it in compassion & joy, instead of self-pity.’ "

        Kornfield J. "Awakening is Real. A Guide to the Deeper Dimensions of the Inner Journey." Sounds True (audio) www.soundstrue.com

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