Ageing, sickness, loss, and mortality can quietly hang-out us — particularly once they contact the individuals we love or our personal our bodies. On this discuss, I discover meet these realities with compassion and knowledge, and relaxation in one thing deeper than what inevitably modifications.
Nice is the matter of
Start and loss of life
Rapidly passing, gone, gone
Awake each, awaken
Don’t waste this life
– Dogen
Click on right here to affix the free Wednesday Meditations – that are open to everybody!
Discuss: Knowledge for Ageing, Sickness, and Mortality
Timecodes & fundamental subjects:
- 00:00–01:57 — The 4 Messengers – Ageing, sickness, loss of life — and the opportunity of peace within the midst of them.
- 03:31–06:15 — Compassion Comes First – Turning towards our personal vulnerability and the struggling of others with kindness.
- 07:28–16:34 — Knowledge With out Bypassing – What Buddhist knowledge affords — and why it will probably really feel insufferable with out compassion.
- 18:33–21:35 — “Be an Island Unto Your self” – What it actually means to relaxation in your self as refuge — trusting follow, not permanence.
- 22:32–27:21 — From Doing Observe to Being Practiced – Dōgen’s radical shift: permitting life and the universe to follow by way of us.
- 28:41–33:16 — The Dewdrop and the Moon – Holding individuality and universality collectively — fragile and huge on the similar time.
- 34:08–Finish — Figuring out Who You Are – Dealing with loss of life, loss, and alter whereas resting in what doesn’t come or go.
A Meditation: Resting within the Sense of Your Innate Goodness
When your thoughts feels busy, self-critical, or weighed down by fear, ache, or unrealistic expectations, it will probably assist to settle the nervous system and are available dwelling to your physique – which this meditation is designed to do. By way of mild consciousness and self-compassion, you’re invited to put down inside stress and reconnect with a felt sense of steadiness, kindness, and your individual innate goodness.
Extra Quotes Referenced:
[T]he simultaneous existence of individuality and universality in our lives is the reality of our existence. This reality is itself “Buddha continually manifesting Buddha,” and after we awaken to this reality second by second, Buddha is manifest. . . . [W]hen we place ourselves on the bottom of actuality, letting go of our individuality with follow, our follow manifests Buddha.
– Realizing Genjokoan by Shohaku Okumura, p. 66
We dwell collectively, the mountain and me, till solely the mountain stays.
– Li Po, quoted by Joseph Goldstein, Tricycle, Winter 2023, p. 109
[R]ecognize all practices and experiences as backlit by the solar of their very own nice completeness . . .
– Anne Klein, Tricycle Fall 2023, p. 57
I do know your burden’s heavy
As you wheel it by way of the night time.
The guru says it’s empty.
That doesn’t make it gentle.
Leonard Cohen
Could all of us develop in grace and peace,
and never neglect the silence that is printed
within the centre of our being.
It won’t fail us.
-Thomas Merton
