Well In Wales - And Scotland
Well In Wales - And Scotland |
- Well In Wales - And Scotland
- Pitch in to help save Namdroling Hospital
- From The Under 35 Project: “Into the Wild”
| Posted: 31 Aug 2012 05:00 PM PDT Well Jademountains readers you must have noticed I'm involved with Field of Merit website and project. Hopefully my posting here will not suffer too much.  I have a couple of beach photographs from the trip Rev. Alicia and I took to west Wales lurking in the wings which am quite pleased with and thought to share here. They connect with Words of Wisdom, our most recent News post on Field of Merit.   And some recumbent Welsh cows for good measure. I have been driving all day from Throssel up to Inverness in the Highlands of Scotland. It is a picture up here. The heather is bright purple at the moment. I'll hold a bunch in my mind for the chap who died here earlier in the week. All merit to his wife and all who know and love him. Read More @ Source
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| Pitch in to help save Namdroling Hospital Posted: 31 Aug 2012 01:00 PM PDT
Now in 2012, the Indian government is requiring further upgrades be made in order to maintain their registered status. The cost of these upgrades is $ 380,000, and the Indian government has given them until October 2012 to raise the money. If the Namdroling Hospital is unable to raise the money, they will be fined $ 15,000 and forced to close. To date $ 80,000 has been raised, and another $ 40,000 has been pledged. The Hospital still needs to raise $ 260,000 in additional funds to meet its goal plus $ 20,000 to cover the IndieGoGo and PayPal fees. Click here to contribute and for more information by way of a very informative short video. Read More @ Source
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| From The Under 35 Project: “Into the Wild” Posted: 31 Aug 2012 10:00 AM PDT
I used to think I wanted to be a hermit. I'd live alone in the woods by a lake á la Thoreau. No one to judge me, no one to bother me, and no one to impress. I read Gary Paulsen novels like "Hatchet" with rapt interest. I watched Into the Wild, fascinated, thinking "this guy knows what he's doing. I could do that. No problem. I hate people." I always thought I was a loner. That I didn't need other people. They certainly didn't seem to need me. I was a sensitive child, and somewhere, I got the message that I wasn't enough. Perhaps I got lost as the middle child, perhaps it was being on the receiving end of one too many thoughtless schoolyard taunts. Whatever the vector, the bullet lodged deep. I floated around from one clique to the next, trying to "fit in." Nothing ever felt right. I had a closet full of masks, but my heart was empty. I had no real friends to speak of, and if anyone tells you otherwise, they're probably mistaking me for one of my masks. I was surrounded by people, yet painfully alone. Sometime after 6th grade, I found a friend for myself. She called herself anorexia. She made me feel good. She told me I didn't need those other people, that I had her and that was enough. She numbed me to the pain I felt from my lack of belonging, made me think I didn't care. Ironically, though I wasn't aware of it at the time, she actually made me feel even more isolated, alone and unlovable. Fast-forward some twenty years. Somehow — perhaps it fell from the sky, I'm not sure — I found myself reading When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chödrön. It spoke to me in a way that countless hospitalizations and years of therapy never had. Pema encouraged me to face my fears, to take myself and the world less seriously, to be kind. I started meditating. At first, it was rough. Thoughts would come up, and I'd get frustrated. "Ugh. Thinking. You moron." I'd say to myself. Then I'd get upset that I was upset. Eventually I learned to be more gentle. As I became more patient, less anxious, and more compassionate with myself, a soft spot opened up. I was becoming aware of feelings I hadn't felt in a long time. I was going into the wild, and the wild was me. One of the first things I noticed was a deep pain I hadn't allowed myself to feel for quite some time. I recognized it as loneliness. It was a bottomless pit of emptiness that terrified me. I'll be damned, I thought, I DO need other people. But after years of pushing others away and presenting a cold, aloof face to the world, I found myself with no people to speak of. I kept meditating. I realized that before I could expect others to love me, I needed to love myself. I continued meditating, touching into this tender spot and making peace with my demons. I gobbled up more books, practiced tonglen, and listened to online dharma talks by Tara Brach. The hole started to shrink. I was still alone, but not quite as lonely. I went for walks in a nearby park, overwhelmed by the sense of connection I felt with the people I passed. The world started to open up. I've since made meditation a regular practice, and I keep Pema's book on my shelf to return to when I'm having a particularly rough day. I've found that when I do feel alone, it's usually because I'm exaggerating my sense of self, making what should be little more than a dent in the road into a giant chasm. My field of vision shrinks as I tell myself stories about how I'm different than everyone else, how I'm the only one that ever feels this way, that no one would understand. I imagine that everyone else's lives are perfect — that they don't have problems — because that's what it looks like to me from the outside. Then I realize I probably look like this too, and it occurs to me that I'm not the only one who wears masks. I'm reminded that we all want happiness. That we all want to avoid suffering. We all struggle with wanting and not wanting, with feelings of inadequacy and with occasional exaggerations of our own importance. We all feel fear, insecurity, vulnerability and longing. I've found that the less absorbed I am in "me", the more room I have for "we." That the more I slow down, take a breath, and just stay present, the easier it is to see our similarities instead of our differences. I know now that I am enough. That everyone is. And I know that I'm not alone, and never was. Read More @ Source 
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Our newest piece to share with you from The Under 35 Project — an initiative from Shambhala Publications to showcase younger authors writing about what they've learned from and about Buddhist practice — is by Jennifer Horton of Greenville, South Carolina. She discovered Buddhism a little less than a year ago, she says, and her world hasn't been the same since.| You are subscribed to email updates from BuddhaRocks ☸ Buddhist To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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