 Practicing with Loss
Loss is a fact of life. Impermanence is everywhere we look. We are all going to suffer our losses. How we deal with these losses is what makes all the difference. For it is not what happens to us that determines our character, our experience, our karma, and our destiny, but how we relate to what happens. – Lama Surya Das, “Practicing with Loss” |
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May you be free from suffering and the causes of suffering! All my best,
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Mini Mindfulness Break for July 18, 2018
Steering the Heart
No matter what situation we find ourselves in, we can always set our compass to our highest intentions in the present moment. Perhaps it is nothing more than being in a heated conversation with another person and stopping to take a breath and ask yourself, “What is my highest intention in this moment?” – Jack Kornfield, “Set the Compass of Your Heart ”
Listen to Sound Sleep Mindfulness Break for Just 1 ¢
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May you be free from suffering and the causes of suffering! All my best,
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Mini Mindfulness Break for July 17, 2018
 That which you believe becomes your world. – Richard Matheson |
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May you be free from suffering and the causes of suffering! All my best,
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Mini Mindfulness Break for July 16, 2018
Allow Space for Serenity Many of us try to do so many things at once that there is no space for serenity. We wonder why we are unhappy, why we feel alienated. We just need to remember to practice relaxing into our life, in all its joys and sorrows, and to relinquish the need to know what’s going to happen next. – Michele McDonald, "Finding Patience"
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| May you be free from suffering and the causes of suffering!
All my best,
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Mini Mindfulness Break for July 15, 2018
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Mini Mindfulness Breaks™ for July 15, 2018 
And did you get what – Raymond Carver     
Read Seven Secrets To Stop Interruptions in Meditaiton for Just 1 ¢
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May you be free from suffering and the causes of suffering! All my best,
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The Magic of Unconditional Love
Unconditional love is the kind of love you share with someone when there are no strings attached. Your love for the other person or pet or whatever never depends on their state of mind, their actions, or their words. You love them unconditionally. You saw an example of this in Micah’s Story from chapter 1.
Another example of unconditional love is in the movie, Breathe. The movie tells the true story of Robin Cavendish, an Englishman born in 1930. At the age of 28, he married Diana Blacker and they had a wonderful life together in England and in Kenya with friends and family. In 1960 or thereabouts Diana became pregnant and Robin became paralyzed from the neck down from Polio. He was on a respirator for the rest of his life.
The couple returned to England and Robin was placed in a hospital for disabled people. After baby Jonathan was born, Diana began a campaign to get Robin out of the hospital so that she could take care of him at home, along with Jonathan. Her care for him for the next thirty-three or thirty-four years was a stunning example of unconditional love.
One of their friends built a wheel chair for Robin with a portable respirator so he could go outside, visit other polio victims he had become familiar with in the hospital, and actually travel to different parts of continental Europe in a specially designed vehicle that would carry the chair. On one occasion, they were traveling in Spain and the portable chair needed to be recharged. One of the traveling companions plugged the respirator in the wrong socket and it blew up. They pulled of the side of the road and were unsuccessful in fixing the portable respirator. While everyone took turns using the manual respirator to keep Robin alive, the inventor of the chair was sent for to repair the portable respirator. In the meantime, a party developed around them that lasted through the night and into the next morning when the inventor showed up. He fixed the respirator and they carried on. Robin and the inventor became advocates for disabled people and many other portable respirators were distributed to other polio victims.
In 1994, Robin’s lungs had become so inflamed that it was time to let him go. They had a “going away” party for him and he died in the summer. He became a medical phenomenon as one of the longest-living survivors of his type of polio. It was said that to know Robin was to know the personification of courage. I would say that to know Robin, Diana and Jonathan is to know the personification of unconditional love. In honor of the unconditional love they all shared, Jonathan produced the movie and his mother, now in her eighties, attended the opening.
Unconditional love is an important component of successful Mindfulness Breaks. When you do a Mindfulness Break with unconditional love in your heart, the chances of it coming true are increased one thousand fold. This is based on my personal experience as well as the Zen teachings of Father Eli. I would say that every time I practiced a Mindfulness Break in the state of unconditional love, what I was visualizing came true. Remember, no one, other than me, thought that Micah would survive.
[Excerpt from Mindfulness Breaks: The Zen Teachings of Father Eli.]Father Eli on Goals and How to Achieve Them
Gratitude, loving kindness and forgiveness are the true foundations for a life of love and happiness. As you will see in a later chapter, these contribute vastly to inner peace, tranquility and equanimity. These qualities purify your heart and mind and promote beneficial hormones in your brain. These are some things to strive for and meditate upon on a daily basis. When gratitude, loving kindness and forgiveness are in place, it is much, much easier to accomplish your goals, whatever they might be.
Are you looking for a partner to share your life with? Are you looking for a new place to live or a new job? Do you need to figure out what to do with a health condition? Is your home or car in bad need of repair? Do you want to start a business of your own? Father Eli taught that Mindfulness Breaks are a wonderful tool for achieving goals.
In life, it is necessary to have some sort of goal. It might be as simple as getting up each day and going off to work so you can chill on the weekend. It might be earning enough money to retire early in life and play golf or tennis every day. Whatever your goal is it is what you are trying to achieve. You’ll find that most successful people have well defined goals.
[Excerpt from chapter 9, Goals and How to Achieve Them in my new book, Mindfulness Breaks: The Zen Teachings of Father Eli, coming soon!]
A Mindfulness Break in Your Home
Now that you understand what a Mindfulness Break is, you can try it for yourself in your own home or workplace.
In your Mindfulness Break you may experience relaxation, healing, connection, well-being and a sense of deep peace right in your own home or workplace. This will help you cope better with the circumstances of your life and the situation in the world today with all the unrest and insecurity. With the current administration in the United States, with immigrants flowing into the EU and other countries and being rejected by the US, with the elephants in Africa being destroyed by poaching, with climate change raising the oceans and melting the glaciers, with more lies from the military / industrial complex, it is difficult to maintain a level of inner peace, happiness, and tranquility.
Mindfulness Breaks can help bring relief from these and other concerns by helping you to take it all in and finding peace in yourself, regardless of what is going on in the world around you. Whether you are a single mom or dad who works hard to keep your kids in school and getting good grades, a working family with two incomes, a senior citizen (like me) with time on your hands, or a single or married millennial with questions about your future, this guided meditation process is for you and your loved ones.
[Excerpt from my new book, Mindfulness Breaks: The Zen Teachings of Father Eli, coming soon!]An Incredible Experience
I had an incredible experience about the time of the summer solstice of 1973 shortly after I arrived at Father Eli’s farm in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. The experience was so powerful that it changed my life into a new direction towards righteousness and liberation.
[The following is an excerpt from Mindfulness Breaks: The Zen Teachings of Father Eli.]
There was a group of about ten of us – all eager to learn what Father Eli was to teach. I had no idea what I was getting into, and didn’t realize that I would be taught to train people to do the special Mindfulness Breaks! When this training began, I was especially moved and grateful to be in the presence of such wonderful teachings. Each morning, I would do yoga and meditation according to the teachings of Swami Rama and each afternoon, I would do a Mindfulness Break.
One morning during the first week on retreat, I sat in my Ford van on my zafu facing the front of the van. I was mentally repeating my mantra when I seemed to disappear into emptiness. I was empty of a separate existence from space and time. The feeling of it is really indescribable. There was no joy and no sorrow. There was no happiness and no sadness. I was one with the whole cosmos. This experience, I knew, was beyond achievement and non-achievement. When I came out of it, I knew it was a life-changing experience. It was similar to, but more intense than the experiences I had on three separate occasions when I was 19.
The first took place during a performance of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven…
The second experience came during Kol Nidre – the night before Yom Kippur…
The third experience came a week later the day before my sister was to go off to college. She was two years younger than me, but only one grade behind…
This third event confused me even more. Was there a God? Did he exist? Was he telling me something? How do I understand these visits of bliss in an altogether unhappy life? What is the significance of the feeling of emptiness I had experienced?
Teachings on Gratitude
Today, I want to relate to you the teachings on gratitude that I learned from Father Eli back in 1973. From my point of view, the expression of gratitude is one of the components of inner peace and a happy life. Things have really changed for me since I began practicing gratitude.
Father Eli taught that gratitude is a means of preparing yourself for an excellent Mindfulness Break. He taught us to think about the things that we are grateful for and recommended that we make a list. He taught us to go over the events of the day when we reached a state of relaxation in our daily practice and find three things we were grateful for that day. When we count our blessings, we tune into our higher selves and come in contact with our inner knowing.
Father Eli writes regarding the old saying,
“I felt bad because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.” Probably the man who had no feet felt bad until he met a man who had no arms or legs and lived in a basket. Perhaps the man in the basket then could compare himself to the man dying in extreme pain and say, “At least I’m comfortable in my basket.” (Second Book of Wisdom, Lesson 18.)
Eli said that there is always something to be grateful for. One of the most important things is the opportunity to work towards awakening in this life. When you tell someone you are thankful for what they did, they tend to do more for us. He gives the example of a child. You bring a child a gift and he shows his gratitude with thanks and kisses and the next time you see him, you’ll bring another toy. But if he is not grateful, you are not likely to bring a gift the next time you see him.
What are you grateful for today? List three things and tell me why.