Monthly Archives: June 2015

Something Good

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deadmanroaderic06

Dead Man Road, image by Eric

1. Please help Amy keep her belongings. Like I told Amy, every time I’m able to give, to help, my hope is that if I ever find myself in a similar situation, someone will reach their hand out to me. As Ram Dass says, “we are all just walking each other home.” If a lot of people give just a little, Amy won’t lose her things.

2. Green Juice Will Not Cure Your Cancer.

3. Second graders line up to get yearbook signed by janitor.

4. mother. nature. from Pia Jane Bijkerk.

5. Frankly Speaking: How I Found Purpose.

6. Free week of Daily Dharma Gathering. “The free one-week trial of the Daily Dharma Gathering goes live June 15-21! This is daily online live meditation sessions with some of the world’s most accomplished Buddhist teachers.”

7. Good stuff from Austin Kleon: Want to be an artist? Watch Groundhog Day, (which just so happens to be one of my favorite movies), and How to graciously say no to anyone.

8. In ‘Eating Lab,’ A Psychologist Spills Secrets On Why Diets Fail.

9. Before You Dismiss the Concept of Thin Privilege, First Ask Yourself These 4 Questions.

10. GLAAD responds.

11. The Moral Bucket List.

12. On Love from Lisa Congdon.

13. The Parting of the Veils from Laurie Wagner.

14. Good stuff from Chookooloonks: curiously strong, and 10,000 hours, and this shared on her this was a good week list,

15. Here’s How To Plan A Week Of Healthy Snacks on BuzzFeed. The two recipes I want to try are the 3 Ingredient No Bake Peanut Butter Oat Squares and the Crispy Kale Chips.

16. David Sedaris Talks About Surviving the Suicide of a Sibling.

17. Fleetwood Mac – Landslide (Robyn Sherwell Cover). I’m a sucker for every version of this song.

18. Good stuff on Lion’s Roar: Dharma gates are everywhere, says Melissa Blacker and A Day in the Life of the Dalai Lama.

19. A Brief Guide to Kick-Starting Your Memoir — Part 3: Where to Begin.

20. Dogs Steal the Show in This Time-Lapse Pregnancy Video.

21. Watch The Broadway Casts Of “The Lion King” And “Aladdin” In “Pitch Perfect”-Style Airport Sing-Off.

22. Amy Schumer: ‘I’m 160 Pounds, and I Can Catch a Dick Whenever I Want.’

23. A Letter from My Heart to Yours: Why Feminism Matters by Julie Daley.

24. After viral Caitlyn Jenner post, Salem man reconsiders — and sees some irony.

25. Wisdom from Bill Murray, “The more relaxed you are, the better you are at everything: the better you are with your loved ones, the better you are with your enemies, the better you are at your job, the better you are with yourself.”

26. Artist Hand-Cuts Insanely Intricate Paper Art From Single Sheets Of Paper.

27. Begin it now, wisdom from Elizabeth Gilbert on Facebook.

28. The Long Goodbye: Angelo Merendino photographed his parents waving farewell every time he left home.

29. The Perfect Thing My Doctor Said About My Life With Chronic Illness.

30. How Long You Can Freeze Everything, In One Chart.

31. saltine crack ice cream sandwiches recipe.

32. Parks & Recreation Final Gag Reel with Season 7 Gag Reel/Bloopers & Final Behind The Scenes Clips.

33. I Went Paleo and Now I Hate Everything.

34. Luscious Legacy Project Living Room Tour. “A gathering. A writing circle. A community of story keepers and recipe collectors daughters and wives and mothers.”

35. The Morning After: Then and Now.

36. Wisdom from Brave Girls’ Club:

Dear Insightful Girl, You already know the answers to the questions that are eating away at you…you just have to trust yourself enough to really listen and be brave with your decisions. You know oh-so-much-more than you give yourself credit for. You have a good heart and powerful intuition and you really do know the right way to go… That doesn’t mean it’s always the easiest way to go…but the easiest path never was the most fruitful path….and you are one of the courageous souls who seeks the best fruit. Trust your gut…it has never led you astray.

37. Losing Amy: The heartbreaking loss of my sister to mental illness.

38. Blah, blah, blah from Seth Godin. Such good advice.

39. Truthbomb #814 from Danielle LaPorte, “Make space in your life for the inevitable arrival of what you want.”

40. Modifications for Garudasana (eagle pose) in a larger body from Body Positive Yoga.

41. The Life-Changing Magic of Losing Shit.

42. Chapter 20: Happy New Year.

43. Unsplash Free Photos. What a great resource.

44. 8 Things to Remember When Your Relationship Gets Rough from Marc and Angel Hack Life.

45. The Moment I Learned To Live And Love In The Now.

46. Joy Williams on The Civil Wars and Her New Album, VENUS.

47. Wisdom from Pema Chödrön,

When someone harms us, they create the cause of their own suffering. They do this by strengthening habits that imprison them in a cycle of pain and confusion. It’s not that we are responsible for what someone else does, and certainly not that we should feel guilty. But when they harm us, we unintentionally become the means of their undoing. Had they looked on us with loving-kindness, however, we’d be the cause of their gathering virtue.

What I find helpful in this teaching is that what’s true for them is also true for me. The way I regard those who hurt me today will affect how I experience the world in the future. In any encounter, we have a choice: we can strengthen our resentment or our understanding and empathy. We can widen the gap between ourselves and others or lessen it.

48. Your Most Frequently Asked Writing Questions, Answered! from Terrible Minds.

49. You Never Really Know What Others Are Going Through. The only thing I feel like I need to add here is that there’s no reason for the people who said they wanted to travel or get a job as a journalist in New York, etc., to feel bad about the things they want in light of the suffering of another. We all have the right to our particular experience. Even when others are suffering, we have the right to joy. We don’t have to be blind to or untouched by suffering to experience joy. There’s room for both, and it doesn’t have to be either/or.

50. Good stuff from Alexandra Franzen: The six types of motivation and The power of “I am.”

51. Wisdom from Friar Richard Rohr, (thanks to Christine Claire Reed for sharing),

Once we see truly what is trapping us and keeping us from freedom we should see the need to let it go. But in a consumer society most of us have had no training in that direction. Rather, more is supposed to be better. True liberation is letting go of our false self, letting go of our cultural biases, and letting go of our fear of loss and death. Freedom is letting go of wanting more and better things, and it is letting go of our need to control and manipulate God and others. It is even letting go of our need to know and our need to be right–which we only discover with maturity. We become free as we let go of our three primary energy centers: our need for power and control, our need for safety and security, and our need for affection and esteem.

52. Harlem Students Cultivate Emotional Intelligence, Lead Each Other in Meditation.

53. Why healthy eating may be the new eating disorder: Raw food and paleo dieters ‘at risk of a dangerous obsession with nutrition.’

54. The Daily Practice.

55. Yes, You Can Have That (Finding My Way Home to My Spirit) from Mara Glatzel.

Day of Rest

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For far too long we have been seduced into walking a path that did not lead us to ourselves. For far too long we have said yes when we wanted to say no. And for far too long we have said no when we desperately wanted to say yes. . . .

When we don’t listen to our intuition, we abandon our souls. And we abandon our souls because we are afraid if we don’t, others will abandon us.

~Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

This quote is haunting me. I’ve been feeling this underlying discontent, disquiet. I’ve been sick and there’s always a period of adjustment going from a stressful work situation to suddenly being on vacation, but this has felt like something more. I feel stuck in old patterns of behavior, have no energy, am depressed.

In the Daily Dharma Gathering talk I listened to this morning, Adreanna Limbach talked about the three types of laziness. What she was referring to was laziness from a Buddhist perspective, which she described as “saying no to our best wishes” or “misdirected will.”

The three types of laziness are, as Adreanna described them, having a lack of vision, speedy business, and disheartenment. We forget our intention, why we’ve said “yes” to something in the first place, lose our sense of purpose, and this can make us feel stuck, apathetic. Or, in a culture which sees productivity as a virtue, we fill up our time doing things that aren’t in line with our vision, our intention, our mission, and we treat busyness as a badge of honor. And finally, we might feel unworthy or disappointed in our efforts and lose patience, maybe even give up.

I was giving myself a hard time the other day for being so lazy on my vacation. I wasn’t getting enough done, was spending too much time resting. Then I really looked at the calendar, and realized it had only been two weeks, and I’d worked through part of that and been sick the rest. It got me to thinking about my distorted view, which I’ve been paying close attention to, noticing.

Like the other day, when I realized how much time I spend thinking about all the things I want to accomplish. I wrote down the to-do list I carry in my head all the time and it filled two pages, everything from becoming a Shambhala Meditation Instructor to clipping my toenails. The problem isn’t so much that the list exists, but that I’m continually checking it against what I’m actually doing, consulting it, contemplating it, seeing how I measure up. It never leaves my conscious mind and because of that I can never really relax, never really be here, never truly be free.

I see this working in so many moments of my life. When I meditate, I sit for 20-30 minutes and sometimes I’m only really meditating for 3-5 minutes because my mind is so speedy, so busy. And this morning, I was longing for a little more rest and some time alone, but when Eric said he was taking the dogs hiking, my first thought wasn’t those things but rather “I should start running again, go this morning and then go to yoga, but first I could do a few loads of laundry, go in early and chant the Guru Gita, go to the meditation sit at the Fort Collins Shambhala Center after yoga, go get groceries on the way home, balance the checkbook and write a blog post.” I did do a few loads of laundry and go to yoga, and while we were meditating and my teacher was giving some really great instruction about letting go and being present, I was totally distracted thinking about the ways the studio could make better use of their Facebook page.

Listening to Adreanna’s talk on laziness makes it clear I’m suffering from the full set, all three. Misdirected will, not saying yes to my best interests, avoiding the things I really want in favor of shoulds, still trying to work that old formula of doing what others want, pleasing them in the hopes that I’ve then earned the right to what I want, but that never really works and I know it.

And then I see this quote again, and I see myself. The seduction of a path that isn’t mine, the saying yes when I wanted to say no, not listening to my intuition, and abandoning myself. I’ve been lazy, but not in the way I thought (not getting shit done) but rather I lost sight of my intention, got busy with other things, and then let my disappointment and impatience make me want to give up. Luckily, there are antidotes to my behavior, my situation. I can reconnect with my intention. I can prioritize what really matters, give it my attention and time, and say no to everything else. I can show up and practice with joyful effort, having faith that the seeds I plant will come to fruition. I won’t give up. I hope you won’t either, kind and gentle reader.

But for now, I rest.