All of us have this precious human birth. We’re fortunate enough not to be starving; we’re fortunate enough to have food and shelter; we’re fortunate enough to hear the teachings and be given methods to wake up; we’re fortunate enough to have good intelligence and the luxury to explore and question why we and others suffer. We have a tremendous amount going for us, so this is the crucial time to practice.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray) 