Appreciation – and please come to our new Blog

While reading an amazing teaching by Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (the main guru of the Dalai Lama) I thought of you.
Let me summarize it in a few short words: It is about clearly seeing that all the misery in our lives comes from ego-clinging; that all the pain we have, we create ourselves. On the other hand, once you have a spiritual view of life, it becomes clear that you will benefit from all interactions with other beings, may they be kind or hostile to you. We all know the special lessons ‘difficult’ people offer us, don’t we? So that shows us that all beings benefit us; it cannot be any other way as long as we are open to learning, to awakening to enlightenment. So all the misery in our lives comes from ego-clinging, and all the good in our lives comes from other beings.
I read this this morning and it just hit me so wonderfully. What amazing gifts we are to each other! What blessings flow between us, so clear to see when things are good, and so obvious also when there are challenges. So we cannot help but be blessed by anyone we encounter, and therefore I say to you:
Thank you, thank you, thank you for being among the beings that have given, and are giving to me so richly!

If such thoughts enrich you and you want to keep getting inspired, please switch to my new blog, where I will be posting from now on. Simply go to http://blog.skillsforawakening.com.blog/ and subscribe on the right hand side.

Thank you!

The Best Beauty Treatment in the World

Today I was waiting in a store. Next to me was a mother who played with her young son. She wasn’t particularly beautiful by common standards, but she was absolutely radiant. It was hard to take my eyes off her. I tried not to stare – but what a wonderful sight!

We’ve all seen that special sheen that comes over anyone who is in love. And yet they don’t sell it in the local beauty salon. That’s a pity; how much money and effort is spent on treatments of a lesser quality! Love makes all eyes shine.

So often I’ve seen it when a client came to me burdened by a depression, sadness or fear. And then an hour later she left and it was like a different person said good bye to me. There was a different spring to their gait, she was laughing and radiant.

And you can have it. You can have it! No, it’s not for sale, but available to anyone who is willing to practice the opening of the heart. Free your spirit for the sake of beauty? It’s as good of a motivation as any, maybe better.

And when love is shining in you, you are sharing this gift immediately with anyone who is near. Yes we would love to get some from you!

Your heart is a treasure house of untold riches and it is always there, available right in your chest. The woman in the store did nothing remarkable; she just wasn’t obstructing her heart. She wasn’t blocking the natural grace of her being.

Here is what you can do to shine: Remember the heart. Focus there. Drink from that richness inside you and it will flow right away into your eyes and your face, it will transform the way you carry your body, your speech will change and you will be highly attractive. Watch people react to you!

And if you can’t do it, it can only be because you are burdened by your thoughts or emotions. Don’t let that happen without any counter measures. If your hair is a mess, don’t you fix it? So when your heart is sad, fix that too. Go to the source. Have you been forgetting the heart?

If you want some more inspiration of how to ‘fix’ the heart, how to drink from that source inside you, go here: http://skillsforawakening.com/solutions/heartsourcing/

I invite you to sign up for 10 days of free HeartSourcing meditations. Give your heart a lift and your whole life will follow!

The 4 Indispensable Ingredients to Spiritual Life ~ Part 1

The 4 Indispensable Ingredients to Spiritual Life

1. Your Highest Goal

If you want to improve your life more than cosmetically you need 4 things: the right goal, the right motivation, the right skills and the right guidance.

Everyone wants to be free of suffering and be more comfortable – but that in itself is not the right goal.

Just look: the whole world wants comfort and can’t find it in all their efforts. Everyone runs this way and that in their search and whatever they find, sooner or later they lose it again. They may be happy for a while, but then disasters strikes again.

Old age, sickness and death are inevitable, as the Buddha taught.

So we need to aim for something more than comfort: we need to aim to be free. Freedom or enlightenment or knowing who you truly are – that alone will bring you the permanent happiness you yearn for. And just like striving for comfort, working toward freedom takes effort. More precisely, it takes effort with wisdom. This will make all the difference.

Today the market place is filled with offerings created by many who may have good intentions but cannot teach us from the space of enlightenment. These methods may bring you comfort – but not freedom. ~They may also confuse you.

Nothing is bad if it serves you and we all want comfort. There is nothing wrong with comfort at all. But for me, if I already make efforts I want them to bring me what I am really seeking. And temporary comfort that will fall apart again is not what I seek.

I am seeking the supreme comfort that can come only from true enlightenment!

We have all been striving for comfort for uncounted life times. How many more will it take until we get serious enough in our spiritual aspiration to stop deluding us with nice spiritual toys and get real?  I had to ask myself this many times on my journey, and each time I got a little more real, a little more focused on doing the work of liberation instead of chasing great spiritual experiences that didn’t set me free.

So choose wisely how you spend your time. If you make great progress going into the wrong direction, what good is all the effort you are making?

Next time we’ll talk about Intention.

Be well,

Ram Giri

Loving humbly

” At some things you stand perplexed, especially at the sight of men’s sins, uncertain whether to combat them by force or by humble love. Always decide, ‘I will combat it by humble love.’ If you make up your mind about that once and for all, you can conquer the whole world. Loving humbly is a terrible force: it is the strongest of all things and there is nothing like it.”

The Spiritual guide Zossima in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

When you demand nothing of the world, nor of God, when you want nothing, seek nothing, expect nothing, then the Supreme State will come to you uninvited and unexpected

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Attachment and Love

You haven’t heard form me in a long time. Well, I’m glad to be back. The following is a paragraph I wrote down after awakening one night a few weeks ago. Something must have been on my mind… It’s a set of  instructions I wrote for myself.

What appears as love with a touch of pain (deep feeling with drama) is the carrier of attachment. These are misunderstandings from childhood. The clear indicator of trouble is the stress in those feelings. However, we connect this stress with a drama of loving and confusion is born. Love is clear. Better a small clear love than a deep confused one that’s attached. Begin with a small clear one and let the clarity in you grow – then relate to the one you love from that.

Ramana Maharshi on ‘Absorbing the Mind in the Heart’

When the mind gets absorbed in the heart,the ego “I” which is the center of the multitude of thoughts vanishes and pure consciousness, or the Self, which subsists during all the states of mind, alone remains resplendent.

It is this state, where there is not the slightest trace of the I-thought, that is the true being of oneself.

It is the undifferentiated light of pure consciousness into which the reflected light of the mind is completely absorbed.

One from Hafiz:

I would not want all my words

to parade around this world in pretty costumes,

so I will tell you something about the bar room view of life.

Love is grabbing hold of the great lion’s mane

and wrestling and rolling deep into existence

while the Beloved gets rough and begins to maul you alive.

True love, my dear, is putting an iron-clad grip

upon the sore swollen balls of a divine rogue elephant

and not having the good fortune to die.

This Morning

I awoke breathing this love you inspire in me,

Noticing that my purpose is nothing less than

To dissolve in this love.

Life’s movement is to become love,

Is to become what we already are,

Is to awaken to our core.

All the movement of bodies and minds

Has this single goal:

To cease in this love.

To cease in this naked embrace

Of the Nothing beyond space and time

And be born again and again

Into this World of Abundance.

This is the joy of Being:

To inhale this love from the heart

And to exhale it into each other.

What is death in the face of this love?

An opening into a greater depth

In the infinite well.

What is mastery?

To see through the movements of mind

As the sun rises through the morning mist.

And your face, each face,

Is the face of this love,

Is the face of the Goddess.

Ram Giri

The Ocean Floor under Your Love

The beloved is not a being of flesh, blood and bone.

The beloved is a hollow reed through whom the wind of God stirs my soul.

The beloved is God, is the Goddess. Through her I can get to know myself.

The beloved is a mirror with my name on it.

How could I not love?

The beloved dwells in me, in the innermost cave of my heart, in the song of my breath, in the movement of the clouds of the mind.

The eye of the beloved is like the sun; always steady in her gaze upon my true heart. The beloved shows me the way to myself.

Everywhere is the land of the beloved. All rivers flow into her. All mountains rise only to touch the hem of her dress. All stars sing her glory as they revolve.

She is the tiniest seed still waiting to sprout into time. She is the inhalation and exhalation of galaxies. She is my body in its universal dimension. She is the way the heart of the world knows itself.

And she comes to me in the form of a woman of flesh, blood and bone – your form.

Your scent and your face tell me simply that it is safe to love, that there is no reason to fear.

Your smile says that I can let go of the mind. That I can find myself in the simple gesture of morning, in the beauty of all the light ever raised from the dead.

My heart responds to your beckoning. I enter your face as a door to the unknown. I become humble and still.

Mirror-face of the creation of God in my soul, what do you hold for me in your secret depth? I bow to your invitation to enter your mystery.

You, my beloved, are the gateway into my infinite beauty.

You look at me from every eye, seeing or blind.

You touch me from inside each cell in my body.

Your heart beats in mine. Your breath holds the still cloudless sky.

Your nakedness covers the world.

Where are you not?

When am I not in your hands?

How can you ever be absent?

What can I do to give you my heart which you already possess?

I am the ocean floor under your love.

Ram Giri