Daily meditation unfolds inner peace, love and bliss, and a great happening happens. That happening is the balance between body, mind and consciousness. Meditation brings perfect health. - Vasant Lad
Ron Echols is a "stringing driver," hauling pipe for fracking operations in West Virginia. He carries it all — 40, 60 and 80-foot pipe — while living out of a motel room in the mountains away from his Ohio home. The job can be stressful at times, even dangerous, but he has help to cope with day-to-day pressures: meditation.
"It sort of resets me," says Echols, who has been driving for 21 years, some of it over the road. "I find breathing meditation to be the simplest and most effective. I think there are benefits physically to it as well. If you concentrate on your breathing, you can't focus on anything else." Echols doesn't know any other drivers who mediate, and he suggests that the majority of truckers think meditation is "wacky, kooky stuff." He adds that for the many drivers, meditation comes across as weakness or worse, for some, as an anti-Christian or Eastern-based religion in opposition to their own religious beliefs. "Mediation is just sitting still. If you tell people to sit still for a few minutes and just breathe, that's something that your mother or your grandmother said to do; sit still and breathe. That's mediation, but they didn't call it meditation. If we can explain to drivers, 'Look, we just want you to sit for a few minutes and breathe; clear your mind,' that's what the old folks used to say. That's what I like to do: clear my mind, turn everything off for a few minutes." (source: www.fleetowner.com) Our mind should be free from traces of the past, just like the flowers of spring. -Shunryu Suzuki
The Animal Rights National Conference, recently met bringing together such various groups as Farm Animal Rights Movement, Mercy for Animals, The Save Movement, Compassion Over Killing and The Humane League, Speakers made a sharp distinction between animal rights and animal liberation.
"Animal rights is different from animal welfare. It's not about better cages; it's about empty cages," said Anita Krajnc of The Save Movement, a group who conducts "vigils" at slaughterhouses across the country. Speakers agreed that any form of meat production is inherently inhumane, making statements such as "There is no such thing as humane slaughter" (Michael Budkie, Stop Animal Exploitation NOW!), "You cannot humanely kill something that doesn't want to die" (Justin Van Kleek, Triangle Chicken Advocates), "I do believe that all farming and slaughterhouses are cruel" (Jaya Bhumitra, Animal Equality) and "All farms are factory farms, no matter the size" (Hope Bonahec, United Poultry Concerns). With permission from the monastery Abbott, a monk borrowed an old boat and rowed out into the middle of a lake for his afternoon meditation session. It was a truly peaceful place to meditate as the boat gently floated.
After more than an hour of undisturbed silence, he felt the bump of another boat bang against his. With eyes still closed, he could feel anger swelling within himself at the careless boatman who didn’t prevent the lake collision. Upon opening his eyes, all he saw was an empty boat which he realized had obviously become untied from the dock and merely drifted out into the lake bumping up against his. Immediately, the monk experience a flash of enlightenment, one which would serve him well for the rest of his life. “The anger is within me,” he thought to himself. “All anger needs is a bump from the outside to be triggered and provoked out of me.” From that moment on, whenever another person irritated him and he could feel even the slightest anger rising, he gently reminded himself: “The other person is an empty, floating boat. The anger is within me.” In brief, without being mindful of death, whatever Dharma practices you take up will be merely superficial. - Milarepa
Life is impermanent, but that does not mean that it is not worth living. It is precisely because of its impermanence that we value life so dearly. Therefore we must know how to live each moment deeply and use it in a responsible way. - Thich Nhat Hanh
In the Dhammapada, another great teaching of the Buddha, it is said that people would never fight or argue if they fully realized they were going to die. - Larry Rosenberg
We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts, we make the world. —Buddha Shakyamuni The thought manifests as the word; the word manifests as the deed; the deed develops into habit; and the habit hardens into character. Watch the thought and its way with care, and let it spring from love, born out of concern for all beings. —Ven. K. Sri Dhammananda I took the photo right after I encountered this beautiful being while hiking a mountain trail in New Mexico yesterday. It's a diamond back rattle snake and was completely non-aggressive. After posting this image on Instagram (@revdzen), a friend messaged me saying rattle snakes help control lyme disease eating rodents which carry ticks which, in turn, carry lyme disease. So I did some research about rattle snakes and lyme disease. Here's the fascinating information I came across in an blog post by environmental writer William LeRoy:
I suspect one reason why lyme disease is on the rise may be due to human interference with nature by the senseless killing of rattle snakes. LeRoy says that "Nature is based upon intelligent design. This means that all living things have a role to play in the environment. It is a simple and unalterable fact, that if you remove one naturally occurring element (animal) from a functioning eco system, other elements (animals) will misalign, and very often to the determent of the entire system....The beauty around us is fragile and has been designed to work perfectly absent human intervention." |
Victor M. Parachin ...is aVedic educator, yoga instructor, Buddhist meditation teacher and author of a dozen books. Buy his books at amazon or your local bookstore. Archives
May 2024
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