Calm when mind is wild (Yongey Rinpoche)

Ven. Yongey Mingyur, July 7, 2020; CC Liu, Ashley Wells (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Keep calm when your mind is wild

(Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche) Learn how cultivating bare awareness (Buddhist mindfulness or sati) can help create a peaceful mind and joyful heart with Rinpoche’s guidance at Joy of Living online course (beta.tergar.org).

We may try meditation to look for peace of mind and think that we aren’t doing it right when we experience the turmoil of our thoughts and feelings.

But we don’t need to force our minds to be quiet: "Meditation" means just being present with our minds as they are.

True calmness comes when we are at ease with whatever we experience, whether our minds are quiet or busy, peaceful or restless, tense or relaxed.

In this video teaching, Mingyur Rinpoche talks about how we can find rest in our mind’s natural awareness – under any circumstances.

For translation choose a language and open it in a separate window. Mute or lower the volume of the YouTube video in order to hear the translation more clearly.

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🔗 Joy of Living Meditation Program: Learn meditation under the skillful guidance of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche at own self pace: joy.tergar.org

🔗 Vajrayana Online: Study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism with Mingyur Rinpoche: learning.tergar.org

🔗Online events, retreats with Mingyur Rinpoche: events.tergar.org

🔗 About Tergar Path: tergar.org/programs

My Meditation Spaceship (Tent)

Ashley Wells, Seven, CC Liu
"Inhale, Exhale, Hike" backpacking yoga trip, Canyonlands Nat'l Park (zozi.com)

Mornings of backyard relaxation or epic hiking and yoga woven around reconnecting to living in the moment? Both are available. An awe inspiring adventure trip offers days of backpacking, yoga, and travel through the red-hued rocks of Canyonlands. The same level of adventure is possible in the backyard, awakening to a morning practice in the cool outdoor air at home. Meditation means getting grounded in the moment. But "all space is here, all time is now" as Wendy Rule sings. So a tent can be a spaceship to travel anywhere in a relaxed and imaginative state. No practice? No problem. Now is the time to learn.

Learn Meditation from Wildmind

• Our posture workshop is where we suggest you start if you don't already have a meditation practice (and perhaps even if you do). We'll take you step-by-step through the process of setting up a meditation posture that will allow you to be both alert and relaxed.
• The mindfulness of breathing is a fundamental meditation practice that everyone should know. The benefits? You'll find that this practice helps you to calm your mind so that there's less inner chatter (especially the stuff that makes you unhappy). You'll find also that you're less distractable and better able to pay attention.
  
• The development of loving-kindness (metta) works directly on our emotional habits, helping us to become more emotionally positive. You'll learn to be kinder to yourself: more patient, more understanding. You'll find that you're more considerate to others and that it's easier to forgive. You may even find (as others have) that others around you mysteriously become easier to be around. Hmm... wonder why that is?
  
• Walking meditation is a great way to bring more meditation into your daily life; it's a practice that can be done even in a busy city street. In this form of practice we develop greater mindfulness of the body, but we also become more aware of our thought patterns, our emotions, and even of the outside world. It's a calming practice. Walking meditation can also be a loving-kindness practice, especially when you're walking in a public place.
  
• Our mantra meditation section is the most popular destination for our visitors. Mantras are simply phrases that we repeat (usually internally, but they can also be chanted out loud). As well as occupying the mind and thus calming it by preventing it from getting up to the usual mischief that causes us pain, mantras also have a symbolic value that evokes spiritual qualities.
  
• The six element practice is a profound reflection on interconnectedness and impermanence. It's a very beautiful form of meditation. It not only helps us to calm the mind and give us a reassuring sense of our place in the great scheme of things, it can be unsettling and challenging as well. Yes, I know. Reassuring and unsettling, that's Buddhist practice for ya!
  

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Love yourself! (and maybe others, too)

Is loving yourself okay?

Wildmind.org
Loving yourself has a bad press in the West. We often associate it with being self-centered and not caring about others. In fact, we have a tendency to want to put ourselves down to avoid being thought of as self-centered.

But in the Buddhist tradition, which has produced countless outstandingly generous and selfless individuals, there is an emphasis on developing love for yourself as an indispensable prerequisite for loving others.

In the Christian tradition we can also bear in mind that the injunction is to “love others as yourself,” implying that we ought to love not just others but ourselves as well. In fact the assumption in saying that we should love others as ourselves is that we already do love ourselves and that we need to extend that love to others! It’s ironic that it’s often people with Christian conditioning that think that loving yourself is sinful.

Introduction to lovingkindness meditation

Ways of Cultivating Metta – Introduction

More on cultivating emotions

Stage 1 – Cultivating metta toward yourself

More on stage one - What’s supposed to happen? - Timing the stages - What if I find it hard to like myself? - Receptivity and activity - Walking in the forest of your mind - Procrustes’ bed - The need for nourishment

Stage 2 – Cultivating metta towards a good friend

Stage 3 – Cultivating metta towards a “neutral person”

Stage 4 – Cultivating metta towards a “difficult person”

Stage 5 – Cultivating metta toward all sentient beings

Special lovingkindness meditations

Buddhists believe that if you don’t love yourself, then it’s hard, if not impossible, for you to love other people. And if you think about it you might find you already suspect that some of the most selfish people you know really, deep down, don’t like themselves. More>>

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Perception and "Consciousness"

Presentation by Peter Russell illustrating the fundamental nature of reality as consciousness. For more visit www.peterrussell.com.The entire seven-part presentation available HERE.

QUESTION: If there is no "self," then who’s sitting here?
Does the Buddhist idea of “no self” strike you as bizarre or outrageous? Sunada at wildmind.org has been reflecting on this difficult concept and shares her thoughts on it so far. It isn’t just…