Dharma Gleanings

May 30, 2015
The next changes will not be in your head or even your heart. They will be in your being.

June 2, 2015
This is a period of integration—discovering how to be after rapture. Which means discovering how to be.

I’m experiencing deep peace alternating with vibrations of insecurity, sadness, uncertainty, little ripples of feeling that seem unmoored—rather like the bodily vibrations I felt during meditations in March. I believed I had bugs of some kind in my hair, or my legs—I settled on bedbugs—until I learned from Shinzen Young that these “creepy crawly” sensations are not unusual for meditators, a kind of release of impurities at a time when much is being released by the spirit.

In the canyon: When I look deeply at the plants, what I see is their patience, their willingness to serve simply by being, the way they express themselves naturally, without consideration for whether others see them, like them, approve of them, find them useful or fine. I see that they have no preference for flowers over leaves, roots over branches, or green leaves over brown crumbling ones.

The leaf doesn’t say, I’d rather be a green leaf than a brown one.
She says, I really dig where I am in this moment.

Since they have in their cells the knowledge of the cyclical nature of all things, they know that no moment of their being is superior to any other—each is exactly as it is meant to be.

When I say to friends, “In my next life, I’d like to be a leaf,” what I mean is that I am, more and more, feeling more and more leafy.

June 3 2015
I’ve compared our body to a suit of clothes that we might launder, try to keep neat, sew some repairs if necessary, always knowing that it is not us and that it will wear out before long.

Others have compared it to a hotel room, which we live in for awhile but don’t think of as our real home.

Today I found an image that I like better. Our body is not just a suit—it’s a costume for the lion in The Wizard of Oz—it covers not just the neck down, but also our precious thinking head, which we may believe is our very essence. And what a relief to shed that costume and experience the lightness of being.

June 4, 2015
Reality has no direction. Reality does not go anywhere.

This saying has stayed with me since I recently received it in a daily email posting of Tejaniya’s wisdom. Of course it’s a reminder to stay in the present moment, however it very beautifully suggests why we should stay there. Everything outside of the present moment is fabrication, and we can only penetrate to the ultimate in the now. Here this. This now.

June 8, 2015
Getting our ducks in a row is a marvelous image, since it is so challenging to perform that feat. And then what happens? They fly off.

June 15, 2015
We collect thoughts as if we were being paid by the truckload.

June 16, 2015
A word that emerges these days for me in meditation practice is “diaphanous.” It’s a fancy word, however it feels perfect to express how we may experience the feeling of the skin when we have deconstructed our fixed notion of our bodies, those sheaths with stuffed pockets we inhabit. “Diaphanous” beautifully suggests the way the sheath of our flesh begins to lift away, becoming light and gauzy and almost transparent, no longer needing to cling to the bone which is also no longer solid and dense. Just as we are no longer needing to cling to that delusion that there are solid boundaries that separate our spirits from others.