yada People by and large become what they think about themselves.The idea is so simple that it is easy to dismiss. People become what they think about themselves. Its almost all a person needs to know about how to be happy.If someone came to me and ask …
It is a great turning point in our spiritual lives when we go from an intellectual appreciation of a path to the heartfelt confidence that says, “Yes, it is possible to awaken. I can, too.” A tremendous joy accompanies this confidence. When we place our hearts upon the practice, the teachings come alive. That turning point, which transforms an abstract concept of a spiritual path into our own personal path, is faith.
How to No Longer Allow Your Expectations Get in the Way of Your Happiness. Isnt it interesting that even though life has its own rhythm and its own natural course to follow, we still insist on trying to control how everything unfolds? We have so many expectations about how thing …
“Some are calling it the ‘wood-wide web’. All the trees here, and in every forest that is not too damaged, are connected to each other through underground fungal networks. Trees share water and nutrients through the networks, and also use them to communicate. They send distress signals about drought and disease, for example, or insect attacks, and other trees alter their behavior when they receive these messages….””mother trees suckle their young…”
When I met Rajneesh many years ago, he gave me the name, Swami Deva Ninad, which means “Divine sound of the waterfall.” Many friends still call me, “Ninad.” Like the flowers in this quote from Osho, the water in the waterfall keeps on flowing, no matter who observes it …
Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
This lovely poem teaches us that Everything happens by itself. The poem is by Lama Gendun Rinpoche and it came in an email from Lama Surya Das. It reminds me of a song we sing at retreats and sangha gatherings called ” Make use of this spaciousness, < ...
“The highest form of grace is silence. It is also the highest spiritual instruction…All other modes of instruction are derived from silence and are therefore secondary. Silence is the primary form. If the Guru is silent, the seeker’s mind gets purified by itself.”
The Happiness Equation by Neil Pasricha gives us a unique set of seven actions that we can take each week to experience happiness in our lives. The Happiness Equations itself is very revealing: want nothing (i. e., non-attachment) + do anything …
Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love. . . . Life always says Yes and No simultaneously. Death (I implore you to believe) is the true Yea-sayer. It stands before eternity and says only: Yes.
When we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door, and we are purely independent of, and at the same time, dependent upon everything. – Shunryu Suzuki …
Mindfulness of the body can be very precise and focused, as when we observe every microsensation of the inbreath and outbreath. It can also be broader and more open, taking in the full sweep of larger activities. The practice of full awareness, a term used together with mindfulness, involves an awareness that draws back, so to speak, to a slightly greater distance, allowing it to encompass the full scope of an activity.
yada Attention is not the same thing as concentration. Concentration is exclusion; attention, which is total awareness, excludes nothing. It seems to me that most of us are not aware, not only of what we are talking about but of our environment, the colours around us, the …
What can be described is the known, and the freedom from the known can come into being only when there is a dying every day to the known, to the hurts, the flatteries, to all the images you have made, to all your experiences– dying every day so that the brain cells themselves become fresh, young, innocent.
What does it mean to be somebody practicing at this time, at this moment? How can we each uproot the ignorance of who we are that accompanies each of us on our own specific journey? The Buddha speaks to the impact of greed, hatred and ignorance; how these have such capacity for harm. Learning about who this somebody is–this identity, if you will–can really support us in this understanding. We bring our identities and our ways of being into the investigation, not in order to avoid them, overcome them, or accentuate them, but in order to be more present.
On Sunday evening, March 22, I was invited to a party to celebrate the launch of our book, I Am with You: Love Letters to Cancer Patients. The party was offered by one of my co-authors, Dr. Leslie Purchase, M. D. at a parlor in San Francisco. I brought my wife, son, and …