Thursday life form blogging

Photo by Walter Calahan

Naomi takes to meditation

Now I wouldn't even know about this if I didn't watch Jay Leno most nights before going to sleep. But it seems supermodel Naomi Campbell lost her temper and threw her cell phone at her maid, injuring the poor woman. (Leno, you see, has cracked a lot of jokes about it.) Take a look:

Fiery supermodel Naomi Campbell is resorting to Yoga and meditation to get a hold on her fiery temper. The supermodel believes meditation and relaxation will help her to manage her angry outbursts.

"It's part of a recovery. I'm trying to stay at a peaceful place inside," she was quoted by the Dailymail,as saying. Next week Campbell will be sweeping floors at a New York car park building as punishment for throwing a mobile phone at her maid, leaving her head badly cut. She was fined $185 and sentenced to five days community service after admitting assault in January. She was also ordered to attend anger management classes, which she said had been a "great experience".

More and more, meditation is being recognized as the way to alleviate suffering and promote happiness. Be sure and practice. This stuff really works!

Two about love

We discussed love as a spiritual practice in ongoing class this week. Here's one passage we looked at:

Let us make a pledge that, if not all day or all night long, at least for a few moments every day, we will make an effort to experience love, love that is free from selfishness, free from desire, free from expectation, love that is complete freedom.

— Swami Chidvilasananda in Kindle My Heart

And here's another:

Let the good in me connect with the good in others, until all the world is transformed through the compelling power of love.

— Rebbe Nachman of Breslov in The Gentle Weapon

The Heart at Your Center

Photo by Cynthia Burgess

From Spirit Taking Form by Nancy Azara:

Imagine your heart at the center of yourself.
Take a picture of your heart there.
This picture can be your heart literally or a metaphorical reference to your heart.
Let this picture speak to you.
Let it tell you something about yourself.
Draw your heart.

Monday meditative picture blogging

Photo by Cynthia Burgess

Largeness of Heart

From Heart by Gail Godwin

The prime virtue in the Confucian system is jen. Jen is the combination of 'human being' and 'two.' It is best translated as 'human-heartedness.' In the sociable Confucian ethic, one cannot become a person by oneself. Jen simultaneously embraces humanity toward others and respect for yourself. If you are a person of jen, you have the capacity to measure the feelings of others by your own. In public and private life, this means you have a largeness of heart that seeks to affirm others as you yourself would wish to be affirmed.

Sunday prayer blogging

From a prayer by Rev. Tom McCready:

Let our religion be as old as sleep
and as new as tomorrow's dawn,
and let our covenant be
the loving and joyful acceptance
of the natural world
in all its shapes and colours, in all its seasons;
and the loving and joyful acceptance
of all the shapes and colours of human desire:
of the heart in all its seasons.

Conditions conducive to practice

It's really important to have a place to meditate where you won't be disturbed - a place dedicated to your spiritual practice:

For meditation to happen, calm and auspicious conditions have to be created. Before we have mastery over our minds, we need first to calm their environment. At the moment, our minds are like a candle flame: unstable, flickering, constantly changing, fanned by the violent winds of our thoughts and emotions. The flame will burn steadily only when we can calm the air aroundit; so we can only begin to glimpse and rest in the nature of mind when we have stilled the turbulence of our thoughts and emotions. On the other hand, once we have found a stability in our meditation, noises and disturbances of every kind will have far less impact.

- Sogyal Rinpoche

This is why it's a good idea to come to the meditation hall to practice. Remember, we have daily meditation here at the Center. Our schedule is on our website and you can click through to that right here.

Friday cat blogging!

Jorge

A cat who lives with Misty and Juan Diaz

"Ditch the small self"

Here's an interesting observation about suffering from The End of Suffering: Fearless Living in Troubled Times by Russell Targ and J.J. Hurtak, Ph.D:

For the most part, our everyday suffering is not caused by tragic events of the heart, but rather by insults—real or imagined—to our ego story. Suffering is the response to these imagined attacks that interfere with what we want and what we feel we need. Fortunately, we can learn to let go of these conditioned responses and view suffering as a delusional idea. We can choose not to collect suffering memorabilia to paste into our scrapbooks. Since our personal story is only made up of ideas, we can learn to release these ego-insults and let them float away like helium balloons. Or, as Ken Wilber would say, if you don’t want to suffer, “ditch the small self.” We the authors would say, “Give up the story—the story of ME.”

It's interesting to view suffering as the result of the mind poison of delusion. But that makes sense. Remember, if we identify the attachment and then let go of it, suffering dissolves.

The well-trained mind

Here are a couple of sayings from the Dhammapada:

Hard it is to train the mind, which goes where it likes and does what it wants. But a trained mind brings health and happiness. The wise can direct their thoughts, subtle and elusive, wherever they choose: a trained mind brings health and happiness.

More than those who hate you, more than all your enemies, an untrained mind does greater harm. More than your mother, more than your father, more than all your family, a well-trained mind does greater good.

I found these on the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation website.

Meditation course introduction

Here's the introduction to a meditation course I found. It sums up what we're about:

More and more people are adding some kind of meditation to their daily routine, either as an effective antidote to stress or as a simple method of relaxation. Meditation enables you to create new attitudes and responses to life, giving you a clear spiritual understanding of yourself. Meditation is the process of re-discovering, enjoying and using the positive qualities already latent within you. Like any skill, meditation requires practice to achieve positive and satisfying results. By doing a little every day, it soon becomes a natural and easy habit.

This week in the ongoing classes we talked about the obstacles to meditation or to applying the meditative principles to life's challenges. One of those obstacles is forgetfulness. I find that reading statements like the one above helps me to remember why I meditate and helps keep me mindful. Regularly availing ourselves of reminders is all to the good.

Tuesday meditation picture blogging

Photo by Bill Miller

What is meditation?

I found this definition on the Wildmind website:

A definition I like to use is, "Meditation is an activity involving the cultivation of mindfulness and the application of techniques to change ourselves in order that we become more fulfilled and more able to see things as they really are."

Meditation is about becoming more fulfilled, but also has the function of helping us to more clearly understand the nature of the world we live in. These two goals are really the same, since we can't be fulfilled if we have serious misunderstandings about life. In particular we have to learn what conditions (actions, thoughts, etc.) give rise to happiness and which to unhappiness.

Meditation gives us tools to quiet the mind so that we can become more aware of the mental processes that lead to greater fulfillment. It also offers us tools to change our mental states so that we become happier.

The whole purpose is to alleviate suffering and promote happiness. Keeping that in mind is the best motivation I know!

A word on gratitude

This is by Edward Hays from The Great Escape Manual :

It is important not only to be grateful to others but also to be grateful for others. We need to cultivate a gratitude for others' giftedness in the same way that we appreciate a beautiful sunset or a smile from a loved one. Others always seem to have been given gifts in life that we desire, and so it's easy to be envious. Riding sidesaddle with envy is a dangerous practice: I would be happy if I had what he or she possesses. By contrast, giving thanks constantly and in all circumstances liberates us from envy.

This is similar to the practice called "sympathetic joy" - the ability to be joyful over another person's success or good fortune. When we are intentional about such a practice, it truly is uplifting and is a powerful antidote to dissatisfaction with our own circumstances.

Love and accept yourself

This is from The Perfection through Perceived Imperfection by Kidest Mengistu.

When it comes to our own selves, we know so little of Love. We have an easy time looking into the eyes of another and uttering the words “I love you,” and yet feel embarrassed if someone were to suggest to us that we should do the same to the self-image we see in the mirror. Could you look in the mirror and tell yourself “I love you”? Most people feel awkward doing this. In fact, we’re more comfortable focusing more on what we think are our imperfections than we do on anything we might even slightly like about ourselves. “Oh my how that freckle grows and shows that I am not as beautiful as the world thinks I should be.” This surface level obsession is our biggest distraction from seeing past our physicality and into our inner beauty. Your inner beauty is your natural beauty, everything else falls away.

Have you ever looked at a giant maple tree and commented on how slanted it’s looking today? Have you ever looked at the brilliance of a sunset and thought it could do with a little more orange? How about the fluttering of a butterfly, did you think it could fly a little faster? We never seem to criticize the natural beauty in these things outside of us. So why do we notice so many “imperfections” in our selves?

I really recommend that you train yourself to look in the mirror and say, "I love you." And really think about that second paragraph above - how it doesn't occur to us to look for imperfections in the natural world so why do we do that to ourselves?

We really do have a choice

From Creating True Peace: Ending Violence in Yourself, Your Family, Your Community, and the World by Thich Nhat Hanh:

True peace is always possible. Yet it requires strength and practice, particularly in times of great difficulty. To some, peace and nonviolence are synonymous with passivity and weakness. In truth, practicing peace and nonviolence is far from passive. To practice peace, to make peace alive in us, is to actively cultivate understanding, love, and compassion, even in the face of misperception and conflict. Practicing peace, especially in times of war, requires courage.

All of us can practice nonviolence. We begin by recognizing that, in the depths of our consciousness, we have both the seeds of compassion and the seeds of violence. We become aware that our mind is like a garden that contains all kinds of seeds: seeds of understanding, seeds of forgiveness, seeds of mindfulness, and also seeds of ignorance, fear, and hatred. We realize that, at any given moment, we can behave with either violence or compassion, depending on the strength of these seeds within us.

Our skill in choosing nonviolence depends on which seeds we cultivate. I can't stop the seeds of ignorance, fear and hatred from being in my mind but I can certainly choose not to feed and water them.

Friday cat blogging!

Mimi

Photo by eggruber (used with permission)

The good life

Today I came across an excerpt from the book entitled What Do You Really Want for Your Children? by Wayne Dyer. Take a look at something he says:

In my experience, when asking parents this leading question, and giving them time to consider the importance of such a profound question, the answers tend toward the ones you will find in the following list.

I want my children to be happy, and free from hang-ups in life.

I want them to know how to enjoy life and appreciate every day as a miracle.

I want them to feel successful and significant as people regardless of what they do.

I want them to have positive feelings about themselves and about life.

I want them to grow up knowing how to avoid having the inevitable problems defeat them in any way.

I want them to avoid being depressed and miserable.

I want them to avoid growing up to be neurotic.

I want them to have a strong sense of inner peace that will sustain them through difficult times.

I want them to value the now: to take pleasure in life's journey, avoiding over emphasis on a destination.

I want them to know that they are the designers of their lives, that they have the power to choose and change their lives.

I want them to be sensitive and responsible to, and have a reverence for, nature and humanity.

I want them to find and explore their potential and feel satisfied and challenged with a purpose in life.

I want them to feel loved and loving.

I want them to find the opportunities that are hidden in life's inevitable painful experiences.

I want them to be on friendly terms with health - physically and mentally.

What would happen if we made the commitment to want these things for ourselves as well as for our children? Wouldn't our lives be happier and wouldn't we be more successful in promoting the happiness of those around us?

Sit and keep silence

This is one of my favorite quotations about the value of learning to be still:

You do not even have to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

-- Franz Kafka