“…on the absolute plane, illness is understood to be caused by the disharmony originating from the fundamental delusion of duality and ego’s self-existence. So while the relative goal of Tibetan medicine is to prevent and cure illness, its ultimate goal is the final cure of all suffering: enlightenment. (by Terry Clifford)
A star of hope beats down upon me as I sit at my playstation,
Ruminating,
Contemplating,
Wondering about past teachers gone awry…. those steely-eyed dragons fermenting a brew of troubles for me to trip upon now born again as countless websites to dive into…. the new blackboards of this time and space.
Where do I make my chalk mark? Where do I make my mark?
Today I sat with stories to tell… the narration of this humanity’s time and my locus within the scheme of things
As they have been
As they are
And as they are to become
Hoping with the telling that the lights and shapes of stars would descend gracefully down upon the earth washing all with the knowledge of the heavens;
The eternal consciousness of now
The offering up of this blessed moment for our pleasure and delight.
Today, I sit again in wonder and dream a dream of Awakening…..
I play amidst my Heart listening for its beat
And the spaces opening in-between;
The rhythm of my life coursing through me revealing stories of my beginning, my ending, my hopes, and the eternal consciousness flowing deep within.
“All of my pursuit of knowledge and understanding had to be centered in my heart. This meant that my emotional life could not be pushed away or ignored. I had to learn a faith in emotional experiencing that would allow me to make use of the vitality I was uncovering. We fear our feelings precisely because they have the power to overwhelm us. Our conventional self, who we think we are, disappears in the heat of passion or excitement or sorrow. We fear this loss of self because it reminds us of what a tenuous hold we have on ourselves in the first place. In guarding against this flood of feeling, we make use of our intellects and retreat into a critical or judgmental mode. But this is unnecessary to perpetuate. The self that we are afraid of losing is a false self. If we can learn not to fear our feelings, we gain access to the real. We have the opportunity to reclaim ‘going on being’. ” (from ‘Going on Being’ by Mark Epstein)
“No amount of outside support can substitute for that inward fire, that quiet passion for living life as if it really mattered, for knowing how easy it is to miss large swaths of it to unconsciousness and automaticity and to our deep conditioning. That is why I urge those who practice….to practice as if their lives depended on it…”
“….one of the most powerful supports in practicing, at least I have found it to be so, is that there are millions of people who are committed to mindfulness and to living a life of awareness, and that at any one moment on the planet, millions of them are sitting. So that when you sit, whenever you sit, you can know that you are not alone. You are “logging on” to a silent “presencing” that knows no bounds and has no center, no periphery. You are joining a very large community of like-minded human beings who share your passion for wakefulness and liberation. And with every day, more and more people are coming to the practice through the thousands of avenues that are nowadays available to folks that in times past were just not there” – Jon Kabat-Zinn