Category Archives: recycled + repurposed

sharing, reblogging, spreading collective wisdom

embodied practice: on noticing happiness (+ all that arises)

I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.” 

~Kurt Vonnegut, “Knowing What’s Nice,” an essay from In These Times (2003)

embodied practice: on the suchness of sangha

“I could hear my heart beating.
I could hear everyone’s heart.
I could hear the human noise we sat there making,
not one of us moving,
not even when the room went dark.”

~Raymond Carver
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

This gem was quoted in the film Stuck In Love (so-so) and instantly evoked for me the image + energy of mindfulness + compassion that we cultivate in what I call the full embrace of sangha. It is the suchness generated within a community of spiritual practitioners + friends.

 

 


Explore:

Suchness, Tathata, Mahayana Buddhism ~ India Netzone

The Contemplation of Suchness (.pdf) ~ Jacqueline I. Stone

Tathata: The The ~ Richard Collins

inviting mindfulness in a moment of madness: how I learned to live the meditation when sitting was not an option

Looking back on the journey. Appreciating all the lessons lived! #DharmaForReal

t scott-miller's avatardhamma for mama*

I was pissed!

Once again, despite my wholehearted intentions and efforts, another Wednesday evening had arrived and, instead of meditating with my root sangha (Buddhist meditation community), I was at home.

Feeling exhausted, out of sync, and in deep need of restoring myself in a place of uninterrupted quiet where I could relax my busy mind with the steady flow of my breath and invite the precious moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness that defines mindfulness.

So I was unduly pissed at myself for not being organized (or awake) enough to get there, my mate for not making it easier for me, and all those unforeseeable or unavoidable forces that arose in the course of a day and became “obstacles” to my practice. Adding to my irritation: knowing that I now lived a few minutes away from the temple yet was faced with detours and delays that made getting there seem like a…

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embodied practice: a perspective on “engaged” buddhism

It is hard to define engaged Buddhism.
But I think it has to do with a willingness to see how deeply people suffer; to understand how we have fashioned whole systems of suffering out of gender, race, caste, class, ability, and so on; and to know that interdependently and individually we co-create this suffering…
Some days, I call this engaged Buddhism; on other days I think it is just plain Buddhism — walking the Bodhisattva path, embracing the suffering of beings by taking responsibility for them.

—Hozan Alan Senauke in Upaya’s Newsletter (11 March 2014)

HEAR HERE [for deep listening]: The Biology of the Spirit |Sherwin Nuland + On Being With Krista Tippett


SN: Well, you just got the word. I’ve been sitting here on the edge of my seat, hoping, ‘When am I going to get to say this word, wonder?’

Wonder is something I share with people of deep faith. They wonder at the universe that God has created, and I wonder at the universe that nature has created. But this is a sense of awe that motivates the faithful, motivates me. And when I say motivates, it provides an energy for seeking. Just as the faithful will always say, ‘We are seeking,’ I am seeking.

We’re seeking different things. I’m seeking an understanding of this integrity of everything, of this unity of everything, of the equilibrium of not just the homeostasis, as the physiologists say, the staying the sameness, but of the closeness that we are constantly coming to chaos. I have had chaos. I’ve had chaos to the point where I thought my mind was lost, which gives me a deeper appreciation of equanimity, not just to continued existence but to continued learning, continued productivity, this kind of thing.

KT: …I mean you really do suggest that the human spirit is something of an evolutionary accomplishment.

SN: I think there is an evolutionary accomplishment of the human cortex, the cortex of the brain, and the way it relates to the lower centers of the brain and the way it relates to the entire body, the way it accepts and synthesizes information, uses information from the environment, from the deepest recesses of the body, the way it recognizes dangers to its continued integrity. And I think that this is precisely what the human spirit is doing. The human spirit is maintaining an equilibrium, and it largely is related to its normal physical and chemical functioning…

Consciousness is only a kind of an awareness of our surroundings, an awareness of our emotions, an awareness of our responses. The human spirit is something much greater. The human spirit is an enrichment. It’s the way we use our consciousness to, I keep using this word, to synthesize something better than our mere consciousness, to make ourselves emotionally richer than we in fact are.

HEAR HERE [for deep listening]: The Biology of the Spirit

embodied practice: reclaiming the spirit of wonder

Recall the religion you practiced as a child. Not the religion you were tutored in,
but the religion before religion, when the vast Heaven and wondrous Earth were truly one…
Can you remember what it was like to walk in the midst of a world of miracles?
Can you remember ever traveling within a world of pure delight with a joy untainted by craving or aversion?

~Frank Jude Boccio, Mindfulness Yoga

HEAR HERE [for deep listening]: Ann Hamilton + On Being With Krista Tippett

AH: A friend of mine who’s a wonderful poet, Susan Stewart, said that hearing is how we touch at a distance.  Isn’t that beautiful?

…But I think that’s also how, like, how I start projects is, in some ways, just to try to listen.

And what is the form of that listening for what something needs to become?

Or to find the question.  Or, you know, listening is obviously a very specific thing in a conversation, but also as a practice, for me, because I respond to spaces, the first architecture maybe is the coat.  But then the next one is this building around us.  And, the felt quality of that already has all this, as you say, information in it.  And so it’s like what is it that is here that maybe asks a question or that can be brought forward.

KT: You’re listening to the space…I also think listening is something we really have to practice, because our everyday spaces are not set up for listening.

HEAR HERE [for deep listening]: Making, and the Spaces We Share

novel wisdom: from “anansi boys” by neil gaiman

each person that ever was or is or will be has a song.

it isn’t a song that anybody else wrote.
it has its own melody, it has its own words.

very few people get to sing their own song.

most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices,
or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd.

so people live their songs instead.

~Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys