Insights for June 2014
Blossoming, image by Margaret Gervais
“It is to untangle that we begin meditation practice. To disentangle ourselves, to be free, requires that we train our attention.” Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield, Seeking the Heart of Wisdom, The Path of Insight Meditation, page 6. From Jack Kornfield, one of my favorite meditation teachers at a weekend intensive, The Psychology of Loving Awareness, Seattle, April, 2014:
"The circle of compassion is only complete when you include yourself.
If one person remains calm and centered it can calm and center all others around them.
Let the breath do the breathing.
Your heart has the capacity to open up to life. We have to practice, tend the heart, and nurture the heart for resilience and self-protection.
Fear, etc., can continue to arise but you will change your relationship to it. Name it and let it wash over you, until you know it and you have a deeper stillness.
Relinquish to the toughest thing that arises: restlessness, loneliness, etc. Say to yourself, "I'll die of restlessness. I'll be the first person to die of restlessness." In this way you will develop a wiser relationship to it."
Luminous insights into bardo (“...the term "bardo" refers to the state of existence intermediate between two lives on earth. Wikipedia. In this article there is discussion of the bardo as a state “in between” and “...bardo experience is a doorway to awakening, which is always present. In Trungpa Rinpoche's words, "bardo is a very practical way of looking at our life."): http://www.tricycle.com/special-section/luminous-gap-bardo I recently finished a book I loved by Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment, and the following are some quotes from the book:
“It’s apparent that each being has a different sort of karmic inheritance; each person has a different karmic load that he or she carries. And it does no good to complain about your karmic load, whether you perceive it to be greater or lesser than somebody else’s. It is what it is. Page 39.
Each moment is the moment that needs to be happening. Page 60.
Life itself shows us what we need to see through in order to be free. Each moment is the moment that needs to be happening. Page 60.
…and so one of the most important steps is to come into agreement with your life so that you/re not turning away from yourself in any way. And the amazing thing is that when we are no longer turning away from ourselves, we find a great amount of energy, a great capacity for clarity and wisdom, and we start to see everything we need to see. Page 114.
One if the greatest poems of the Zen tradition ends with this description of the awakened state: ‘To be without anxiety about imperfection.’” Page 130.
Refuge Recovery: A Buddhist Path to Recovering from Addictionis a new book by Noah Levine on the Buddhist approach to sobriety. I just ordered it and will share more from this book as I read it. http://www.tricycle.com/reviews/dharma-drunks Steven Forrest is one of my favorite astrologers, and he has a great website with his Newsletters, classes and audio recordings, http://www.forrestastrology.com. His July Newsletter is great. Here are some of my favorite quotes:
"Can you be like the wise old karate master and remember that often times the best karate move is often to simply walk away?
...are you brave enough to say, roll the dice? Somewhere in your chart (and in your life!) Uranus is asking you to trust your fiercest, wildest rebel impulses.
Saturn and Uranus are 150 degrees apart for the entire month of July. What does this mean for you? Specifically, Saturn-in-Scorpio cautions us that unconscious factors—old wounds, fears, and humiliations—need to be faced squarely and incisively before we get on our high horse and start arranging firing squads, SWAT teams, and Predator drones. And Uranus-in-Aries tells us that once we have done that Scorpionic housecleaning, it is time for bold, decisive action. Time to roll those dice."
(If you want to know more about the Saturn and Uranus transits in your chart, please contact me, theinsightcenter@gmail.com)