Daily Insight:
Mary Oliver:
Love Yourself, Love the World

“...eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in…
And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star
Both intimate and ultimate,
And you will be heart-shaken and respectful.

And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper
Oh let me, for a while longer, enter the two
Beautiful bodies of your lungs...

Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for your eyes.

It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of a single heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life- just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
Still another…

And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.”

― Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems

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Daily Insight:
Positive and Negative Empathy
by Amit Ray

“There are two types of empathy: the positive empathy and the negative empathy. When we are fully carried away by the unaware activities of the mirror neurons, we are under the trap of negative empathy. The negative empathy generates attachments. Out of these attachments suffering follows. Negative empathy is a kind of reaction to a situation, whereas positive empathy is internal response of peace love and tranquility.... In positive empathy, your deep tranquility, joy and peace activates the mirror neurons of the others, whereas in negative empathy your mirror neurons are activated by the disturbance of others.”

― Amit Ray,
Yoga and Vipassana:
An Integrated Life Style

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Daily Insight:
Compassion and Loving-kindess
by Dalai Lama XIV

“Just as compassion is the wish that all sentient beings be free of suffering, loving-kindness is the wish that all may enjoy happiness. As with compassion, when cultivating loving-kindness it is important to start by taking a specific individual as a focus of our meditation, and we then extend the scope of our concern further and further, to eventually encompass and embrace all sentient beings. Again, we begin by taking a neutral person, a person who inspires no strong feelings in us, as our object of meditation. We then extend this meditation to individual friends and family members and, ultimately, our particular enemies.

We must use a real individual as the focus of our meditation, and then enhance our compassion and loving-kindness toward that person so that we can really experience compassion and loving-kindness toward others. We work on one person at a time.”

― His Holiness the Dalai Lama

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Daily Insight:
Fear and Now by Eckhart Tolle

"A great deal of what people say, think, or do is actually motivated by fear, which of course is always linked with having your focus on the future and being out of touch with the Now. As there are no problems in the Now, there is no fear either."

— Eckhart Tolle

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Daily Insight:
True Refuge by Tara Brach

“May I be filled with lovingkindness; may I be held in lovingkindness.
May I feel safe and at ease.
May I feel protected from inner and outer harm.
May I be happy.
May I accept myself just as I am.
May I touch deep, natural peace.
May I know the natural joy of being alive.
May I find true refuge within my own being.
May my heart and mind awaken; may I be free.”

― Tara Brach, True Refuge:
Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart

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Daily Insight:
Practice of Loving-kindness
by Jon Kabat-Zinn

“There is really no natural limit to the practice of loving kindness in meditation or in one’s life. It is an ongoing, ever-expanding realization of interconnectedness. It is also its embodiment. When you can love one tree or one flower or one dog or one place, or one person or yourself for one moment, you can find all people, all places, all suffering, all harmony in that one moment. Practicing in this way is not trying to change anything or get anywhere, although it might look like it on the surface. What it is really doing is uncovering what is always present. Love and kindness are here all the time, somewhere, in fact, everywhere. Usually our ability to touch them and be touched by them lies buried below our own fears and hurts, below our greed and our hatreds, below our desperate clinging to the illusion that we are truly separate and alone.

...

Make sure that you are not trying to help anybody else or the planet. Rather, you are simply holding them in awareness, honoring them, wishing them well, opening to their pain with kindness and compassion and acceptance.”

― Jon Kabat-Zinn,
Wherever You Go, There You Are:
Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

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Daily Insight:
The Mindful Nurse
by Carmel Sheridan

“Nursing work is stressful – physically and emotionally demanding. The daily grind can cause back issues, ill health, and emotional distress. Fortunately, loving-kindness meditation can help counteract those difficulties.”

― Carmel Sheridan, The Mindful Nurse:
Using the Power of Mindfulness and Compassion to Help You Thrive in Your Work

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Daily Insight:
Loving-kindness in Action
by Jack Kornfield

“My colleague Sylvia Boorstein tells of Phil, a Buddhist practitioner in New York who had worked with loving-kindness practice for years. One evening on a small side street in SoHo, a disheveled man with a scraggly beard and dirty blond hair accosted Phil, pointed a gun at him, and demanded his money. Phil was carrying more than six hundred dollars in his wallet and he handed it all over. The mugger shook his gun and demanded more.

Stalling for time, Phil gave him his credit cards and then the whole wallet. Looking dazed and high on some drug, the mugger said, “I’m gonna shoot you.”

Phil responded, “No, wait, here’s my watch—it’s an expensive one.”

Disoriented, the mugger took the watch, waved the gun, and said again, “I’m gonna shoot you.”

Somehow Phil managed to look at him with loving-kindness and said, “You don’t have to shoot me. You did good. Look, you got nearly seven hundred dollars; you got credit cards and an expensive watch. You don’t have to shoot me. You did really good.”

The mugger, confused, lowered the gun slowly. “I did good?” he asked.

“You did really good. Go and tell your friends, you did good.”

Dazed, the mugger wandered off, saying softly to himself, “I did good.”

Whenever our goodness is seen, it is a blessing.”

― Jack Kornfield,
Bringing Home the Dharma:
Awakening Right Where You Are

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Daily Insight:
Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hahn

“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”

― Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness:
An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation

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Daily Insight:
Loving-kindness
by Sharon Salzberg

“Can you revise your perceptions to see the world in terms of suffering and the end of suffering, instead of good and bad? To see the world in terms of suffering and the end of suffering is Buddha-mind, and will lead us away from righteousness and anger. Get in touch with your own Buddha-mind, and you will uncover a healing force of compassion.”

― Sharon Salzberg, Loving-Kindness:
The Revolutionary Art of Happiness

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Daily Insight:
Lama Surya Das on Missing Out on Life

“The past is over, and the future is unknown. We can dwell in the imagined worlds of yesterday and tomorrow if we so choose. But the more we do so, the more we miss out on life itself as it is happening, moment by moment, and the more we fail to realize who we actually are, moment by moment.”
― Lama Surya Das, The Big Questions:
A Buddhist Response to Life's Most Challenging Mysteries

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Daily Insight:
The Wisdom of No Escape
by Pema Chödrön

“We ourselves can sort out what to accept and what to reject. We can discern what will make us complete, sane, grown-up people, and what—if we are too involved in it—will keep us children forever. This is the process of making friends with ourselves and with our world. It involves not just the parts we like, but the whole picture, because it all has a lot to teach us.”

― Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape:
And the Path of Loving-kindness

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Daily Insight:
Awakening the Buddha Within
by Lama Surya Das

“I've also learned that you don't always get to pick the people with whom you travel the journey. You sometimes may think you do, but don't be deceived. And the corollary of that – and this was my real lesson – is that you start to realize that you can love even the people you don't like and must love and help everyone.”

― Lama Surya Das, Awakening the Buddha Within:
Eight Steps to Enlightenment

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Words of Wisdom for Dec. 31, 2019:
Calmness in Activity is True Calmness

"Calmness of mind does not mean you should stop your activity. Real calmness should be found in activity itself. We say, "It is easy to have calmness in inactivity, it is hard to have calmness in activity, but calmness in activity is true calmness."
— Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind:
Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice

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Words of Wisdom for Dec. 30, 2019:
Alan Watts:
Our Thoughts Are Not Our Own

“We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them thatexcrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body. Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules.”
― Alan Watts, The Book on the Taboo
Against Knowing Who You Are

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Words of Wisdom for Dec. 29, 2019:
Thich Nhat Hanh:
Peace, Joy, and Serenity

“Peace is present right here and now, in ourselves and in everything we do and see. Every breath we take, every step we take, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity. The question is whether or not we are in touch with it. We need only to be awake, alive in the present moment.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step:
The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

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