Aloha Sangha

ancient wisdom for crazy times

Category: gratefulness

to live wisely, and able to love
This is our work: to live wisely, not in contention with anything, and able to love.
What does it mean to practice Dharma in the home stretch of 2023, with all the wars, hate crimes, refugee crises, and environmental catastrophes all over the world?
I would offer a short and simple response, quoting Sylvia Boorstein, great grandmother, psychologist and Dharma teacher since 1985:
I want to live my life wisely, not in contention with anything, able to love. This sounds ordinary as I write this, but I think it’s the fundamental goal of spiritual practice.
On-Being with Krista Tippett
This week, rather than bore you with my thoughts, I would like to present passages which speak to me directly about just how to live as Sylvia suggests, wisely, not in contention with anything, and able to love.
As we witness second hand the terrible events in the world, I feel guilty thinking it is also important to celebrate the beauty in my life, and express my gratitude for it.
The poet Rumi counsels us to “let the beauty we love be what we do.” Even if we are stuck doing what we don’t really love, our mindfulness practice has a magical way of melting the resistance and opening the door to the alchemy Rumi alludes to here:
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Still Water Center
In many places people wake up empty and frightened every day because of the non-stop violence in their lives. What might it mean for me to “kneel and kiss the ground”?
The poet and essayist Mark Nepo shows the work of our mindfulness practice is a kind of kneeling down into the moment, and kissing the ground of our being, is a kind of self-cleansing.
Moving through my fears doesn’t mean I have to absorb or placate the demands of others. Facing my pain doesn’t mean I have to withdraw from what comes my way. On the contrary, I need to open the ancient door of my own making and let life kiss me on the forehead.
James Baldwin, the gay African American novelist, writes of how his struggles for legitimacy and authenticity in the 50s and ‘60s led him to hard fought inner grace, where:
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word love here not merely in a personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy, but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
This, then, is our work. To kneel down into the moment, to kiss the ground of our common experience, take off our masks in the process, and discover peace and joy in the shared nature of being as the mind settles down and the heart relaxes.
To live wisely, and able to love.
12/02/2023
thank you, nonetheless
Buddhism offers us a path to decolonize the mind, thankfully. It not only teaches inclusion, it points out the shared insanity of separateness that causes so much suffering.
Lama Thubten Yeshe was one of the first Tibetans to teach Buddhism to Westerners. I went to see him in Nepal, but he had just left to teach in the USA, where he died from heart disease in 1984, at age 49.
Several of his Western students recount that whenever he met anyone, he would always bow, and with sparkling eyes say “Thank you, thank you.”
This is coming from a person who witnessed the destruction of his beloved Buddhism in his native soil and the near genocide of his people. Yet, his response to the world was thank you, nonetheless.
Back then I had no idea why he would always be saying be saying thank you.
Thanksgiving in the pandemic
It is Thanksgiving Day here in the USA. A big holiday where families gather, eat hearty food, and share their stories. But with the pandemic, we refrain from family gatherings and follow the CDC guidelines for physical distancing.
In some parts of this country, it’s also a Day of Mourning.
Colonization, so much a part of the historic Thanksgiving tradition, brought about another near genocide–of Native peoples and their cultures. And it’s not over.
Yet, we meditate.
We meditate with our minds shaped in no small measure by these brutal cultural forces.
Gratefulness is a Buddhist practice
And we practice gratefulness; like Lama Thubten Yeshe, we say thank you, nonetheless.
Buddhism offers us a path to decolonize our own minds, thankfully. Mindfulness, insight, and metta directly counter the harm of erasure many people of color feel in these post-colonial times.
Buddhism not only teaches inclusion, it points out the shared insanity of separateness that causes so much suffering.
When I meditate and reflect on the teachings, I feel a little like what Thoreau might have felt when he wrote in his journal:
I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite, only a sense of existence. … O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.
When I reflect on the teachings handed down from person to person for over 2600 years, I am stunned. Writing did not develop until about 300 years after the Buddha’s death.
Gratitude to the lineage of teachers
To think of all the care, time and dedication it demanded for hundreds of people to commit to memory, in an organized fashion in dedicated teams of “reciter-monks”, what today occupies 43 volumes of the Buddha’s oral teaching, is simply mind-boggling.
I feel gratitude to all those nameless folks, and to my own teachers, who dedicated their lives to practice deeply so they could teach me.
I am grateful to my wife and children who offer me emotional support when I need it.
I am grateful for all who wear masks, who deliver the food to the stores, and to all essential workers.
And I am grateful to you all for creating this Aloha Sangha, where we meet every week for silent meditation and share our experiences with each other in this intimate space.
Sensing the fragility of life, I am grateful for one more day.
The challenge in these post-colonial times
So this is our challenge in these post-colonial times–to allow gratitude to touch our hearts and minds without coming apart by feelings of fear, anger or loss.
To just say thank you, nonetheless.
Maybe this is what Lama Yeshe was teaching us all along.
11/26/2020
enoughness
Our meditation practice shows us radical enoughness. We have all we need to lead a fulfilling life now. If you can breathe, you can be mindful.
Your of well-being is actually independent of conditions. As your practice matures over time, the feeling of well-being arises more frequently and in all kinds of situations.
We may feel a little chagrined finding ourselves in those old emotional haunts, and can laugh at ourselves more readily.
This marvelous discovery prompted former Google engineer Chade-Meng Tan to pen his bestselling book “Joy on Demand.”
trust, courage and gratefulness
Let’s explore some implications of this discovery, specifically regarding trust, courage, compassion and the attitude of gratefulness. These qualities add richness and depth, transforming this well-being into a truly spiritual endowment.
During a talk he was giving on “grateful living”, David Steindl-Rast, a Catholic Benedictine monk, was asked by an audience member how she could possibly feel grateful after just being laid off from her job, and feeling overwhelmed at how she can continue to care for her sick father, and help one of her kids who is in trouble with the law?
His answer is remarkable for its depth and clarity.
When I ask myself, would I feel grateful if I had just been laid off from my job–not to mention the other challenges you are facing–the answer is no. How could anyone in your position feel grateful?
But gratefulness is not a feeling; gratefulness is an attitude. Even though we have a grateful attitude toward life, we may or may not feel grateful. No should applies here. Our feelings are not under our control; only our attitude is.
He went on to explain:
You feel a trust in life that overcomes fear. This trust makes your heart feel wide open and free, the very opposite of those anxious feelings that squeeze your chest until you can hardly breathe.
Now, that deep trust in life is not a feeling but a stance that you deliberately take. It is the attitude we call courage; and courage is quite compatible with feeling afraid. Courage presupposes fear; it is the attitude of one who goes ahead in spite of fear, anxiety, and fatigue.
A grateful person trusts enough to give life another chance, to stay open for surprises. As you stay open in grateful trust, grateful feelings will start to bud. By living the gratefulness we don’t feel, we begin to feel the gratefulness we live. This is not a quick and easy recipe, but you will find that it works.
Take a moment right now. Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Close your eyes. Become aware of your breath breathing itself. Notice the enoughness of your life in this moment.
Our practice is about coming back to the present and finding the well of being that comforts us and dis-inclines us from being pulled and pushed around so much by everything that we like and everything we don’t like.
The Buddha said we suffer because we don’t have what we want. Or we have what we want, but we’re afraid to lose it. If we judge everything by likes and dislikes, we’re always unhappy.
There is something deeper. There is something more fundamental.
Our life just as it is!
Or as Brother Steindl-Rast puts it – contentment comes from knowing the gift that is unceasingly being given to you.
It’s simple: meditate, discover the happiness independent of circumstances, trust your life as it is, lean into the suffering of yourself and others with courage, and open to the flowering of gratefulness, compassion and loving-kindness for all beings everywhere.
This is our path. It’s what we signed up for.
01/25/2018
gratitude in Buddhism

Even though it’s not the end of the year yet, Thanksgiving has always been a time of reflection for me. I look back with chagrin at all my failures and aspirations. And I think about our world.
We don’t have to look too far to see how much pain we have been through so far this year with so much gun violence, acts of racial injustice, growing economic disparity, environmental calamities, the North Korean crisis.
And yet we move forward, to keep on giving and loving.
Buddhist monks begin each day with a chant of gratitude for the blessings of their life. In Tibetan Buddhism, the monks and nuns offer prayers of gratitude even for the suffering they have endured:
Grant that I might have enough suffering to awaken in the deepest wisdom and compassion.
It’s easy to take for granted our life. The Shin Buddhist monk Ho Sen’s haiku:
Another year passed.
Empty rice sacks remind me
how lucky I am
You would think Ho Sen would feel lucky and grateful if his rice sacks were full, but instead he reflects on his good fortune. The empty sacks lead him to think about all the food he has received that kept him alive. It’s easy to forget how fortunate we are to be alive.
Is it possible to actually feel gratitude for our life just as it is with all of the stuff we add on this this thought, like am I missing out on any Black Friday deals?
The lovely, elder Cambodian monk, Maha Ghosananda, a witness to unthinkable atrocities in his country one said:
If we cannot be happy in spite of our difficulties, what good is our spiritual practice?
The opening paragraph of Thich Nhat Hanh’s beautiful book, Being Peace comes to mind:
Life is filled with suffering, but it is also filled with many wonders, like the blue sky, the sunshine, the eyes of a baby. To suffer is not enough. We must also be in touch with the wonders of life. They are within us all around us, everywhere, any time.
Remember, these are words from a man who watched as his country, Vietnam, being torn apart by war and as his family and friends wounded and killed by bombs, Agent Orange, and other devastations.
On this day we give thanks, can we share a little of our safety, well-being and relative privilege with others, by radiating loving-kindness to the less fortunate?
May all beings be happy, be safe, be liberated from suffering and the causes of suffering.
Have a great Thanksgiving.

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), The Meal, also called Bananas, 1891

11/23/2017
grateful mind yoga
A complaint I sometimes hear from folks who are trying to be happy by practicing meditation is that meditation is just not working. Putting effort to change your mental state does sometimes lead to frustration. Gratefulness, however, is a wholesome mental state which changes everything.
notice when you naturally feel content in your daily life
Begin to notice moments in your day when you naturally feel peaceful and content.
If you tend to have a life filled with drama, like in your workplace, start being aware of moments when you’re not uncomfortable, fretful, or consumed.
wholesome states of mind
The key could be for you to cultivate wholesome states of mind.
In order to experience deeper well-being my teachers taught me to deliberately develop specific wholesome mental states, such as kindness, generosity, empathy, well-wishing and gratefulness.
These mental states have an expansive quality; they open your heart and create more ease in your mind. But more importantly, they condition the following moment, which leads to more contentment and joy.
unwholesome states of mind
They contrast with the unwholesome mental states, such as greed, anger and envy, which provide momentary pleasure but actually contract the mind and lead to discomfort, distress and frustration.
I am reminded of the Overeater’s Anonymous slogan: “a moment of bliss on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.”
cultivate the wholesome
Take an honest look at what mental states come up for you both on and off the cushion. Are they wholesome and lead to inner ease and expansiveness? And if wholesome mental states do not arise, try to make a genuine attempt to cultivate them.
This is a lifetime’s practice.
Mindfulness allows us to simplify our life, moment by moment we are present with what is presented to us by our senses.
When we experience the tug and push of compelling thoughts or emotions we gently acknowledge them and come back to the utter simplicity of this breath, or this sound, or the touch of our feet in “rubbah slippahs” as we walk.
letting go
We come back again and again, gently, kindly, by simply letting go of everything that is not this breath, this sound, this touch, this smell.
And in this letting go sometimes we get a glimpse, an intuition, that this moment is enough, just as it is.
I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands.
~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden
silent gratefulness
Moment by mindful moment we nurture the present by simply being here for it, welcoming it, silently grateful for this gift that is that is this breath, this sound, this touch, this smell of the plumeria blossoms outside my window.
This silent gratefulness is one of the most powerful wholesome mental states.
the splendor of the present
Step by step, the path of mindfulness reveals the splendor of the present here in just this moment.
When we are silently grateful, we appreciate our life just as it is. And through this appreciation, we feel compassion and loving-kindness for others.
In other words, we find contentment.
This is grateful mind yoga.
08/18/2017
occupy home
I read online somewhere that before they enter kindergarten kids are exposed to thousands of commercials. I remember when our son was just four he told me most emphatically “Daddy we need to buy that toothpaste — next time, tell Mommy.”
Popular and social media mesmerize many with 24/7 slogans, sound bites and odd notions of normalcy. The problem is that those who craft these messages are pretty good at what they do, and before we know it, we have let the messages occupy some precious real estate in our mind.
Back in the 12^th Century, in Germany, lived an extraordinary woman, the Benedictine abbess Hildegarde Von Bingen – “a poet, author, philosopher, theologian, singer, musician, composer, playwright, artist, architect, doctor, botanist, herbalist, visionary, preacher, seer, and canonized Catholic saint” according to one biographer.
Responding to the popular, restrictive and corrosive messages of her day, she wrote:
We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.
Lots of these messages, like the one about the new, improved toothpaste that got my son’s attention back then, play on our sense of needing more, better, faster. It’s a major feature of our times. It organizes the way a lot of us live. It conditions much of our thinking and interactions more than what we may be open to realize.
Another remarkable nun, from our time, commented:
One of the advantages of being born in an affluent society is that if one has any intelligence at all, one will realize that having more and more won’t solve the problem, and happiness does not lie in possessions, or even relationships: The answer lies within ourselves. If we can’t find peace and happiness there, it’s not going to come from the outside.
~ Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, American Buddhist nun.
Look at our constant low level anxiety around keeping all our various apps, drivers and devices all running the latest and greatest new versions.
But those moments of silent gratefulness – of welcoming each breath, each sound, each smell, and each rubber slipper step — calm this frenzy.
Hut at Nassau (1885) by Winslow Homer, from The National Gallery of Art.
In each mindful moment we occupy home.
Step by step, the path of mindfulness reveals the splendor present here in just this moment.
I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands.
~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Tara Brach reflects on when Munindra, a Buddhist meditation teacher from Bengal (now deceased) was asked why he practiced meditation, his response was,
“So I will see the tiny purple flowers by the side of the road as I walk to town each day.”
Mindfulness allows us to simplify our life, moment by moment we are simply present with what is presented to us by our senses. When we experience the tug and push of compelling thoughts or emotions we gently acknowledge them and come back to the utter simplicity of this breath, or this sound, or the touch of our feet in “rubbah slippahs” as we walk.
We come back again and again, gently, kindly, by simply letting go of everything that is not this breath, this sound, this touch, this smell.
And in this letting go sometimes we get a glimpse, an intuition, that this moment is enough, just as it is.
I’ll let Saint Hildegarde Von Bingen have the last word this week:
“Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.”

05/19/2016