Daily Insight: Rick Hanson: You Can Give So Much In Life

“You can give so much in this life, and that offers you many opportunities to release the self. For example, you can give time, helpfulness, donations, restraint, patience, noncontention, and forgiveness. Any path of service—including raising a family, caring for others, and many kinds of work—incorporates generosity. Envy—and its close cousin, jealousy—is a major impediment to generosity. So notice the suffering in envy, how it is an affliction upon you. Envy actually activates some of the same neural networks involved with physical pain. In a compassionate and kind way, remind yourself that you will be all right even if other people have fame, money, or a great partner—and you don’t. To free yourself from the clutches of envy, send compassion and loving-kindness to people you envy.”

― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain:
The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

book ad recommendation 200613z

Daily Insight: Noah Levine: A Loving Relationship with Ourselves

“Loving-kindness is the experience of having a friendly and loving relationship toward ourselves as well as all others. The experience of sending loving-kindness toward ourselves is perhaps as simple as bringing a friendly attitude to our minds and bodies. Typically, we tend to judge ourselves and be quite critical and harsh in our self-assessments, identifying with the negative thoughts and feelings that arise in our minds. Being loving and kind isn’t our normal habit, so training the heart/mind to be kind is a great task. Mindfulness brings the mind’s negative habits into awareness.”

― Noah Levine, The Heart of the Revolution:
The Buddha's Radical Teachings on Forgiveness, Compassion, and Kindness

book ad recommendation 200612z

Daily Insight: Pema Chödrön: Watering the Seed of Goodwill

“Making the aspirations is like watering the seed of goodwill so it can begin to grow. In the course of doing this we’ll become acquainted with our barriers—numbness, inadequacy, skepticism, resentment, righteous indignation, pride, and all the others. As we continue to do this practice, we make friends with our fears, our grasping, and our aversion. Unconditional good heart toward others is not even a possibility unless we attend to our own demons. Everything we encounter thus becomes an opportunity for practicing loving-kindness.”

― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You:
A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

book ad recommendation 200610z

Daily Insight: Sharon Salzberg on the Nature of Love

“When we have insight into our inner world and what brings us happiness, then wordlessly, intuitively, we understand others. As though there were no longer a barrier defining the boundaries of our caring, we can feel close to others’ experience of life. We see that when we are angry, there is an element of pain in the anger that is not different from the pain that others feel when they are angry. When we feel love, there is a distinct and special joy in that feeling. We come to know that this is the nature of love itself, and that other beings filled with love experience this same joy.”

― Sharon Salzberg, Lovingkindness:
The Revolutionary Art of Happiness

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Daily Insight: Starting to Say Yes to Life

“The whole journey of renunciation, or starting to say yes to life, is first of all realizing that you've come up against your edge, that everything in you is saying no, and then at that point, softening. This is yet another opportunity to develop loving-kindness of yourself, which results in playfulness--learning to play like a raven in the wind.”

― Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape:
How to Love Yourself and Your World

book ad recommendation 200513z

Daily Insight: Thich Nhat Hanh: Love is a Beautiful Word

“Maitri can be translated as "love" or "loving kindness". Some Buddhist teachers prefer "loving kindness" as they find the word "love" too dangerous. But I prefer the word "love". Words sometimes get sick and we have to heal them. We have been using the word "love" to mean appetite or desire, as in "I love hamburgers". We have to use language more carefully. "Love" is a beautiful word; we have to restore its meaning. The word "maitri" has roots in the word mitra which means friend. In Buddhism, the primary meaning of love is friendship.”

― Thich Nhat Hanh

book ad recommendation 200511z

Daily Insight: You Yourself Deserve Love and Affection

“The foundation of metta practice is to know how to be our own friend. According to the Buddha, “You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”

― Sharon Salzberg, Lovingkindness:
The Revolutionary Art of Happiness

book ad recommendation 200510z

Daily Insight: Mother Teresa on Practicing Humility

“These are the few ways we can practice humility:

To speak as little as possible of one's self.

To mind one's own business.

Not to want to manage other people's affairs.

To avoid curiosity.

To accept contradictions and correction cheerfully.

To pass over the mistakes of others.

To accept insults and injuries.

To accept being slighted, forgotten and disliked.

To be kind and gentle even under provocation.

Never to stand on one's dignity.

To choose always the hardest.”

― Mother Teresa,
The Joy in Loving:
A Guide to Daily Living

book ad recommendation 200330z

Daily Insight: Pema Chödrön: Wake Up

“Life’s work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into the circle wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will. It’s going to stick around until you learn your lesson, at any rate. You can leave your marriage, you can quit your job, you can only go where people are going to praise you, you can manipulate your world until you’re blue in the face to try to make it always smooth, but the same old demons will always come up until finally you have learned your lesson, the lesson they came to teach you.”

― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

book ad recommendation 200319z

Daily Insight: Pema Chödrön: Six Teachings Misinterpreted

“There are six teachings that you might misinterpret: patience, yearning, excitement, compassion, priorities, and joy. The misinterpretations are: You’re patient when it means you’ll get your way but not when your practice brings up challenges. You yearn for worldly things but not for an open heart and mind. You get excited about wealth and entertainment but not about your potential for enlightenment. You have compassion for those you like and admire but not for those you don’t. Worldly gain is your priority rather than cultivating loving-kindness and compassion. You feel joy when your enemies suffer, but you do not rejoice in others’ good fortune.”

― Pema Chödrön, Always Maintain a Joyful Mind:
And Other Lojong Teachings on Awakening
Compassion and Fearlessness

book ad recommendation 200315z

Daily Insight: Reteaching a Thing Its Loveliness

“Seeing the goodness in someone does not imply ignoring their difficult qualities or unskillful actions. Rather, we can fully acknowledge these difficulties, while at the same time we choose to focus on the positive. If we focus on the negative, we will naturally feel anger, resentment or disappointment. If we focus on the positive, we will forge a connection to the person. Then as we look at their negative traits or actions, we do it as their friend. If two friends are looking at such difficult things, they do so standing side by side.

This mirroring quality, whereby we 'reteach a thing it's loveliness', is one of the greatest attributes of metta. The power of metta enables us to look at people and affirm the rightness of their wish to be happy; it affirms our oneness with them. The power of love reflects both to ourselves and others the manifold possibilities available in each moment.”

― Sharon Salzberg, Lovingkindness:
The Revolutionary Art of Happiness

book ad recommendation 200314z

Daily Insight: Sharon Salzberg on Metta

“Metta is the ability to embrace all parts of ourselves, as well as all parts of the world. Practicing metta illuminates our inner integrity because it relieves us of the need to deny different aspects of ourselves. We can open to everything with the healing force of love. When we feel love, our mind is expansive and open enough to include the entirety of life in full awareness, both its pleasures and its pains, we feel neither betrayed by pain or overcome by it, and thus we can contact that which is undamaged within us regardless of the situation. Metta sees truly that our integrity is inviolate, no matter what our life situation may be.”

― Sharon Salzberg, Lovingkindness:
The Revolutionary Art of Happiness

book ad recommendation 200218z

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: 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

book ad recommendation 200130z

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: 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: 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

book ad recommendation 200125t

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 Dharma July 25, 2019 Sharon Salzberg

“Loving kindness is a form of love that truly is an ability, and, as research scientists have show, it can be learned. It is the ability to take some risks with our awareness-to look at ourselves and others with kindness instead of reflexive criticism; to include in our concern those to whom we normally pay no attention; to care for ourselves unconditionally instead of thinking, "I will love myself as long as I never make a mistake." It is the ability to gather our attention and really listen to others, even those we've written off as not worth our time. It is the ability to see the humanity in people we don't know and the pain in people we find difficult.”

― Sharon Salzberg
Real Happiness:
The Power of Meditation

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