Daily Dharma

When you encounter suffering that you can’t stop no matter how hard you try, you need equanimity to avoid creating additional suffering and to channel your energies to areas where you can be of help.

May we learn to delight in the joy of another wherever it may be found. May we sponsor a heart that seeks to end the suffering of others. 

Cultivating skillful effort, we learn to distinguish the “right” amount of effort. Not too little. Not too much. Just right. In tune. When we find the right pitch, our practice flourishes.

In meditation, feel that lovingkindness and compassion—connect with it, soak it up, and let it cover your whole body. You can indulge in it because there’s nothing bad about it.

Nothing is merely a means to an end, nothing is merely a step on the path to somewhere else. Every moment, everything, is absolutely foundational in its own right. 

A person who is not loving has not experienced love. It is not his fault. Realizing this gives rise to forgiveness. We vow that suffering will stop with us.

If you have mindfulness enabling you to read yourself and understand yourself, craving will have a hard time forming. In whatever guises it arises, you can read it, know it, extinguish it, let it go.

If you do not feed the brain words, if you have trained it to avoid verbalizing, the silence will come.

Like a forest fire, anger tends to burn up its own support. If we jump down into the middle of such a fire, we will have little chance of putting it out, but if we create a clearing around the edges, the fire can burn itself out. 

Everything is changing constantly, but the awareness, the fact of being aware of sensations and change, does not change. There is always awareness.