martes, 6 de junio de 2017



Thanks for subscribing! In this issue we bring you an exclusive article, as well as news of two events running in June. We hope you can join us on one of them!

1. A Love as Deep as Life Itself!

The highest form of love in the Buddhist tradition is called upekkha — a word that literally means "intimately seeing." Upekkha is often translated as equanimity, or balance, but this does not even begin to capture the reverential, cherishing and other-regarding nature of this spiritual quality. It recognizes that if we truly want beings to be happy we should rejoice in and encourage the cultivation of insight in ourselves and others.
Upekkha, the quality we'll be exploring on this 28-day online meditation course, represents the unity of wisdom and compassion — our whole being integrated in the desire to liberate oneself and others from suffering. In helping us to relate to beings in terms of their deepest desire for wellbeing and to recognize their innate potential for awakening, upekkha is a love as deep as life itself.
This event is suitable for people of all levels of experience, including complete beginners.
Join us to cultivate upekkha!

2. Living With Awareness!

Mindfulness has been clinically proven to reduce stress, promote feelings of wellbeing, and improve mental and physical health. It's a powerfully transformative quality that helps us develop greater presence and calmness, reduced emotional reactivity, and greater emotional stability. In short, mindfulness puts us back in change of our own lives.
This 28-day online meditation event offers guided meditations, exercises, and tips to help you bring more mindfulness into your life and experience the powerful benefits of this practice.
This event is suitable for people of all levels of experience, including complete beginners.
Sign up now to cultivate mindfulness!

The most important thing you need to know about life, according to Buddhism

Arguably the central teaching of Buddhism, without which the others make no sense, is that things change.
While “things change” may seem like a commonplace observation, made by dozens (at least) of philosophers and religious teachers over the last few millennia, the Buddha wasn’t content simply to pay lip-service to the concept of impermanence, but followed through the implications of this fact as far as he possibly could.
He saw our resistance to change as the source of our suffering. He talked about this resistance in terms of clinging — a desperate attempt to hold onto stability in the flowing river of time.
Clinging sometimes manifests as expectation — we want something to happen in a particular way, and we suffer when it doesn’t. This can result in huge amounts of suffering, when for example we have unrequited love (expecting the other person to reciprocate our feelings when they don’t), or when we get depressed when life doesn’t turn out the way we’d expected it to. Expectation can also work in much smaller ways, though, as when we get frustrated when we want the traffic or supermarket checkout line to move faster than it does.
One of the implications of impermanence is that things are changing in dependence on things that are also changing. The movements of traffic depend on the weather, on road conditions, on the number of people on the road, the individual mental states of drivers, and so on. Life is complex, and largely out of our control.
And so one way we can become happier is to recognize when we have expectations, and to let go of them. To give you an example from my own life, I’d often feel frustrated when my kids (who are still fairly young) take longer than I expect to do things I want them to do, like get ready to go out. I used to end up getting annoyed with them, and sometimes yelling. Now I’m more likely to see that I have an expectation that’s going to make me suffer, and to let go of it. Taking a deep breath, letting go, and accepting that I can’t control my children helps me to be more at ease when we’re getting ready to go someplace.
We can also let go of expectations that we won’t age or get sick, that the weather will cooperate with our plans, that our possessions will last forever without breaking, and so on.
While the fact of things changing can seem like a problem that we have to manage, it’s also a blessing. We’re capable of change. We may have habits that cause suffering for us and others around us, but we can unlearn those habits. And we can learn new ways of being. We can learn to be wiser, kinder, more patient, and so on. There’s nothing about us that is so fixed that it can’t change.
The Buddha’s teachings emphasized how the mind can progressively change in ways that allow us greater happiness and freedom. Without getting too technical, he outlined several lists of progressive mental states leading to the complete freedom from suffering that’s called Awakening or nirvana.
When we resist change, it’s a curse. When we accept change, it’s simply a fact. When we use change as a tool, it’s a blessing.
With love,
Bodhipaksa

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