Reflections on how to live a meaningful life inspired by "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying" by Sogyal Rinpoche and teachings from other Buddhist masters
Posted in Contemplation, Freedom, Karma, Turning Suffering and Happiness into Enlightenment, zz Sogyal Rinpoche on Jul 22nd, 2011
My brother’s Au pair had a cold when I visited a few days ago. A day later I had one, too! Sigh! A vivid reminder, how we human beings share our happiness and suffering in this life with each other. Granted, having ice cream and hot chocolate for desert surely didn’t strengthen my immune system. [...]
My last post was on bringing awareness of karma into our life. Karma explains what positive and negative actions are and helps us to live and act accordingly. Rigpa has a wonderful free daily email with inspiring quotes from Buddhist teachings (sign up here) and in the last couple of weeks two of them were [...]
In my last post I mentioned that I wanted to write about how we can know that a spiritual teacher is an authentic. But since my reflections in the last few days have been on karma I decided to write about that instead. A few months ago I already did a short series of posts [...]
Posted in Karma, zz Sogyal Rinpoche on Mar 8th, 2010
Reflecting on karma over the last few days I came across three old friends, to be precise, actually enemies that are disguising as friends. I am sure you are already guessing who they are. Here is how they popped up again: In The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying Sogyal Rinpoche explains the meaning of [...]
Over the past few days I have looked for teachings on karma in my favorite Dharma books to help me start reflecting on my new topic. I always find stories about the Buddha very inspiring and was delighted when I found some anecdotes on how Buddha realized the truth of karma in The Tibetan Book [...]
Posted in Buddhism, Karma, zz Khenpo Ngawang Palzang, zz Maudgalyayana, zz Shariputra on Mar 3rd, 2010
If you are reading this post chances are that you are a Buddhist practitioner. Imagine someone comes up to you and asks: “What is the teaching of Buddha really about?” Reflect for a moment. What would you say? There are many ways to answer the question. One way to answer it would be to respond [...]
We had a Tsunami warning today because of the disastrous earth quake in Chile. I heard some sirens go off briefly around 5 am but didn’t find out about the warning till about 7 am when our land lady called and told us we needed to evacuate by 10:30 am. Hearing of the possibility of [...]
Posted in Eight samsaric dharmas, Freedom on Jan 19th, 2010
One of the main study texts that my teacher Sogyal Rinpoche wrote for his students begins with, “Regardless of who we are, the main purpose of our life—you could call it the heart of being human—is to be happy.” I remember attending a teaching by Trulshik Rinpoche in San Francisco about 10 years ago. He [...]
Posted in Ten non-virtuous actions, Vegetarian Diet, zz Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche, zz Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, zz Sogyal Rinpoche on Jan 11th, 2010
Yesterday, a friend forwarded an email to me about a mass slaughter of dolphins in Denmark. Apparently, every year a mass slaughter of hundreds of dolphins takes place on the island of Feroe. The dolphins are herded into a shallow bay and killed slowly with hooks. The whole bay turns red as they slowly bleed [...]
Posted in 06 Death and Impermanence, 07 Karma, Four thoughts on Jan 5th, 2010
Life seems like a busy marketplace to me. There is a lot going on, we get bombarded with all sorts of things right and left. On one side there are our responsibilities. There is always something that needs to be done. Coming out of a longer period retreat a few weeks ago, it strikes me [...]
Powered by Twitter Tools