Commit to Sit

Take the Tricycle magazine 28 day meditation challenge. Their spring issue will be all about taking a meditation retreat without retreating from your home environment. I know most of you have a dedicated practice already, so it might be nice to up the bar a bit and have an official spring cleaning of the mind, and make it a point to sit every day for the next 28 days.

Read more about the 28 day meditation challenge at the Tricycle website:

http://www.tricycle.com/issues/web_exclusive/3763-1.html

...allow yourself to move...

"Allow yourself to move...", these words are those of Rumi...

I found them in an interview that Krista Tippett offered on Public Radio at "Speaking of Faith" to Fatemeh Keshavarz, a professor of Persian and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Their conversation, broadcasted a few weeks ago, is entitled "The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi" and is undoubtedbly worth listening to wholeheartedly.

It is very good ... but I am not telling you more about it.

To connect to "The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi" ...click here

I seize this opportunity to warmly recommend the program "Speaking of Faith" which offers a wide variety of interesting talks with fascinating guests. You will find on their website many references to help you going further into the subject, you can make your voice heard by contacting them, listen to the music they offer during the broadcasting, and also be guided to continue the conversation or facilitate an exchange with a group.

And... maybe you'll also find interesting the talk entitled "Exploring the Biology of the Human Spirit" somehow touching the same topic as the previous post "Why Does the Mind Wander?".

If you listen, or have listened, to some other talks offered by "Speaking of Faith" and particularly appreciated one, please tell me about it, I'll be happy to share your recommendation.

Enjoy listening to Rumi,
Koka

Why does the mind wander?

Today MSN was displaying an interesting article about our wandering minds. It looks like if science is now taking the torch from the great mental masters and looking into how our mind focuses on thoughts (or rather how it doesn't very well).

So if you've ever wondered what the purpose of a wandering mind actually is, you might find this article interesting.

Click here to view the article:

working with oneness

As I was exploring, and wandering for my own pleasure, into The Golden Sufi Center website whose link I previously posted with the text of Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, I came across another very interesting site: Working With Oneness.

You will find there lots of interesting people we know or others that we may not have had the pleasure to meet yet on our path, as Adyashanti, Anne Baring, Anne Scott, Duane Elgin and many others...

I wanted to share this link with you, hoping you may feel the same enthusiasm that I felt discovering its spirit.

To connect to Working with Oneness ... click here

Enjoy,

Koka

When we see beauty...

1. Does it make sense to you that when you see a flower, or when you see beauty, at that very moment you must be beauty? I hope so, because it means that beauty is not outside of yourself; you are beauty and you are truth. We can appreciate the beauty of a flower because we also feel its impermanence as our own. We can say we know that roses and thorns are as inseparable as night and day because it is no different with us. It is us. Therefore beholding the flower, or carefully holding the rose, we can treasure our own beauty and appreciate the evanescence of this fleeting life.

Excerpt of a talk given by Kwong Roshi.

Jakusho Kwong Roshi, successor in the lineage of Susuki Roshi, lives in Sonoma, California and is the author of a book written with Peter Levitt, NO BEGINNING, NO END: THE INTIMATE HEART OF ZEN, prefaced by Thich Naht Hanh and edited by Peter Levitt.

You reading this be ready

Will you ever bring a better gift
for the world
Than the breathing respect that you carry

Wherever you go right now? Are you
waiting
For time to show you some better
thoughts?

William Stafford, THE WAY IT IS. NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (St. Paul, MN. Greywolf Press, 1009) p.45

If you would like to know more about William Stafford and his poetry ... click here
and if you would like to read more of his poetry ... click here