Faithful laity sending dāna/act of generosity of fresh vegetables to feed the forest Sangha and children of Dhammagiri Foundation, home to orphans and disadvantaged children from the hill tribes of Mae Hong Son, Northern Thailand.🙏
May all beings everywhere, with whom we are inseparably interconnected and who want and need the same as we do,
May all be liberated, healed, fulfilled and free.
May there be peace in this world and throughout all possible universes, an end to war, violence, poverty, injustice and oppression, and may we all together complete our journey of enlightenment. - #LamaSuryaDas
Thoughts, feelings, perceptions are just that: thoughts, feelings and perceptions. They arise, stay for a while and cease. They're not you, not yours, not self.
"Many people cannot allow themselves the time to sit and do nothing but breathe. They consider it to be uneconomical or a luxury. People say 'time is money.' But time is much more than money. Time is life. The simple practice of sitting quietly on a regular basis can be profoundly healing. Stopping and sitting is a good way to focus on mindful breathing and nothing else." #ThichNhatHanh #Dharma#Mindfulnes #PlumVillage#Capitalism#EngagedBuddhism @engagedbuddhism @dharma @plumvillage
How to practice during the coming #Authoritarianism. Thay getting real about the experience of war & how to survive & practice Dharma when the sh¡t goes down. When the bombs were dropping & the villages were being destroyed, could he have ever imagined the Beloved Community he would be so instrumental in building?
How to practice during the coming Authoritarianism. Thich Nhat Hanh getting real about the experience of war and how to survive and practice Dharma when the sh¡t goes down. What atrocities has he and the Vietnamese people experienced through all those years? What kind of karma have we created? How inexplicably intertwined are the US and Vietnam? When the bombs were dropping and the villages were being destroyed, could he have ever imagined the Beloved Community he would be so instrumental in building?
May all beings everywhere with whom we are inseparably connected, be fulfilled, awakened, liberated and free.
May there be peace in this world and throughout the entire universe, and may we all together complete the spiritual journey. - #LamaSuryaDas
However innumerable beings are, I vow to meet them with kindness and interest.
However inexhaustible the states of suffering are, I vow to touch them with
patience and love.
However immeasurable the dharmas are, I vow to explore them deeply.
However incomparable the mystery of interbeing, I vow to surrender to it freely. #ThichNhatHanh
"Although there is no singular, solid entity to be found, everything is in flux and is interdependent. This planet is our community. It knows no national boundaries. Filling the landfills and oceans with plastic, burning and releasing carbon fuel into the atmosphere, destroying the rainforest—these mindless human actions endanger feather, fur, fin and skin. These actions are not to be ignored but to be reversed. It’s simple: mindless and careless causes and conditions have harmful effects." https://www.elephantjournal.com/2009/02/everyday-buddhadharma-buddhist-lojong-slogan-in-post-meditation-be-a-child-of-illusion-linda-lewis/
Someone I recently met who studied under Buddhist monks put it this way:
"The only thing we can really control is how we relate to everything else."
When you choose to relate to everything around you in conflict, when you choose to relate to the world as its victim, you inevitably become a void. You accept a station that was not given to you, but that you've given to yourself. You accept a mindset of eternal war: war with yourself, war with others, war with community, war with society.
I find myself less and less on here, because this once positive space of learning and shared ideas has, for some reason, devolved into voids. Voids of self-appointed victimhood, of constant warring with everything, everyone. I find myself more and more particular about the people I allow into my space, because even some people I find very dear are voids, and I am very sensitive to it, and because I am still learning how to create the appropriate psychic boundaries. Because I am, also, prone to becoming a void, and because if I spend too much time in others' I tend to then create one myself, and I want to choose not to allow myself this.
It's harder for many of us to choose the alternative: to relate to the world as its beneficiary, as a responsible steward of it, as a crucial moving part of it, even when it sometimes wrongs us; to relate to others with compassion and empathy and appropriate boundaries rather than constant conflict. It's easy to choose neural feedback loops of cortisol and adrenaline -- it feels good for a moment (and then it feels bad long term as it impacts our health negatively), our society provides plenty of opportunities to do so, and many of us learned to seek these feedback loops in our environments growing up. But what feels better, long term, that is harder to cultivate, are the feedback loops of dopamine through appropriate action and fulfilling achievement, oxytocin through true connection and existence among and with others, and so on.
It's easy and even rewarded in our society to tell me I'm wrong: "I don't get to choose how I feel about anything. If it's bad, it's bad, and it has to be bad." It takes work to relate to hardships with resilience, to accept that "trauma", the way that our lives shape us, is not always negative.
Pain is real, suffering is a choice. This I've learned. This I continue to learn, the hard way, each and every day as I engage with this journey I've been tasked with.
"Emaho!" is the shortest Dzogchen teaching. The word means "wondrous," "amazing," "farout," "fantastic." It expresses the joy and wonder — amazement, really — of discovering within ourselves and our world the radiant splendor of our innate natural state directly perceived by our own eyes — the great completeness, wholeness, and oneness of all that is. As the fourteenth-century Dzogchen master Longchenpa sang, "Since things are perfect and complete just as they are, beyond good and bad, without adopting and rejecting, one just bursts out laughing!" . . . Emaho! - #LamaSuryaDas