Compassion in the Attention Economy
Compassion in the Attention Economy |
- Compassion in the Attention Economy
- From the May 2012 Shambhala Sun magazine: “Blindsided”
- Let’s Burn All the Art!
- Compassion in the Attention Economy
- From the May 2012 Shambhala Sun magazine: Tsoknyi Rinpoche on emptiness
- From The Under 35 Project: How not to tell a colleague to **** off
- Review: Open Heart, Open Mind, by Tsoknyi Rinpoche
| Compassion in the Attention Economy Posted: 14 May 2012 06:00 PM PDT Not sure how you guys can joke around when there's like 1,000 kids stuck in a well probably. ~some guy on Twitter That quip encapsulates a phenomenon that one often sees on social media. There does seem to be like … Continue reading →  Read More @ Source 
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| From the May 2012 Shambhala Sun magazine: “Blindsided” Posted: 14 May 2012 04:00 PM PDT
"Blindsided" appears in the special section "Embrace Change" in the May 2012 Shambhala Sun magazine. Click here to browse the issue online. Read More @ Source
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| Posted: 14 May 2012 03:00 PM PDT jianghomeshi Apr 19 2012 a host on Canada's CBC channel wrote on Twitter: Me: How much do u care about your artistic legacy? Woody Allen: 'When I'm gone I couldn't care less if they flush my films down the toilet.' … Continue reading →  Read More @ Source Tonglen Guided Meditation by Tulku Tsori Rinpoche 
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| Compassion in the Attention Economy Posted: 14 May 2012 02:00 PM PDT Not sure how you guys can joke around when there's like 1,000 kids stuck in a well probably. ~some guy on Twitter That quip encapsulates a phenomenon that one often sees on social media. There does seem to be like 1,000 kids stuck in wells all over the world. There are pleas made to give [...] Read More @ Source 
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| From the May 2012 Shambhala Sun magazine: Tsoknyi Rinpoche on emptiness Posted: 14 May 2012 01:00 PM PDT
Read more of "This Is My Mind, Luminous and Empty" here. You can find the full article, which includes meditation exercises on emptiness and clarity, in our current May 2012 Shambhala Sun magazine. Read More @ SourceThe DYING Process - Tsem Tulku Rinpoche 
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| From The Under 35 Project: How not to tell a colleague to **** off Posted: 14 May 2012 12:00 PM PDT
"Sarah has hit on something that we all face in our work life — that difficult person we simply can't wish away," Lodro says. "They are there, day after day, presenting us with an opportunity to practice." Click through to read Sarah's story, and to learn how you can be a part of the Under 35 Project. How not to tell a colleague to **** off A few years ago I worked with someone who truly shook my practice. I was just at the start of "serious" practice and was definitely not ready for such a challenge. Thankfully for me, it has been a rare occurrence, but every so often in life you encounter someone who makes you want to gouge your eyes out and shove them in your ears so you no longer have to see or hear their absurdities. If there's anything I can't take, it's bad manners, and without meaning to sound too much like my mum, what does it really cost to be polite? This particular colleague was a pure bully, bringing a very special combination of bad manners (to put it politely) and chaos. The situation was made worse by the fact that I had worked so hard to get this job at a prestigious hospital. And in a matter of weeks, I could feel her wearing away at my delicately constructed layers of confidence. And this was the person I was required to work most closely with in my job. This post isn't going to be all rant, but in the interest of being informative, I was faced with a colleague who ignored me when I said good morning and goodbye, and who actively disagreed with everything I said, professionally or otherwise. Despite being at a similar level as this colleague, I was treated as the skivvy, doing all the jobs she didn't want to do. Far from feeling like a grown-up professional, I was 15 again and back in the playground dealing with the school bully. Thankfully I had come some way from the modes of retaliation I opted for at school, but she certainly unleashed years of built-up frustration at a particular breed of girls. There was definitely something in the fact that I was in a large all-female department; it was as if some primitive powers of destructive competition would meander their way through the department on a daily basis. So, I began working on trying to make life more bearable primarily for myself and resisting the urge to tell her precisely and explicitly what I thought of her. Of course, it did go through my mind to try to reason with her in a very adult fashion and tackle things head on, but the thought of doing this made me feel physically nauseous, and I feared making things even worse than they already were. So instead I added her into my daily practice as the 'difficult person' in my metta bhavana (loving kindness) practice. And my god, did it stretch me. I had to work up to just picturing her in the practice, let alone sending any metta. It surprised me to realize, however, that the first stage of sending myself metta was every bit as important as the latter stages. It was okay to realize that I was suffering too. After some weeks I was finally able to tolerate a short period of sending her metta, and I had a few 'light bulb' moments. I realized she was clearly suffering herself, as no one at peace with herself could display such behavior. I also realized I wasn't the only person around her she caused to suffer, and there were most likely people who were less able to cope with this than me. Finally, I decided there must be people out there in the world who find her utterly agreeable. Dzogchen Ponlop makes a very apt observation of an angry work colleague: "Appreciate that she's caught up in a pattern of confusion and that her confusion causes her more pain than it's causing you, because it touches all parts of her life. You're only dealing with it at the office." How true — if only I had read this at the time! It's also so easy to make other people's issues about us. All I could think at the start was "What the hell have I done to her?" "What's so awful about me that she can't stand?" This is a great example of the ego closing in and shutting down our thinking. Clearly, the world does not revolve around me, although this feels like a revelation on some days. Slowly… very slowly… things started to shift. I watched the frustrations build up in myself as my ego was seriously threatened, and then slowly dissipate. I let go of the resistance to her behavior. It was what it was. I tried to help those around her who she upset. After some months, I noticed that at times (on a good day) I could approach her slightly more compassionately. This stood out for me on two particular occasions. The first was her birthday, when her card was making the rounds to be signed. While I had the impulse to write something decidedly rude on it, I paused and sat deep in thought, wanting to say something kind, but also genuine. So it turned out I could find a few words. The other occasion was when I held the door open for her. She did not acknowledge me — not even a bit of eye contact — but waltzed straight past without a "thank you" in sight. This was a situation that would have infuriated me on a normal day, but on this day something different happened. I laughed. So was it the perfect response? No, probably not. But it was progress from the blind rage I had felt earlier. And the weird thing was that the laughter was at both of us: her for her blatant rudeness, and me for my incessant desire for impeccable manners. So on my last day at my work, I thanked her and said goodbye. I didn't lie; I didn't tell her I was sad to be leaving or that I would miss her, but I did work hard to find something kind and constructive to say. And she ignored me, naturally. So what happened to my colleague? Well, rumor has it she was disciplined after I left. And me? Well, I haven't experienced such progress in my metta bhavana practice since. Read More @ Source 
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| Review: Open Heart, Open Mind, by Tsoknyi Rinpoche Posted: 14 May 2012 11:00 AM PDT  Tsoknyi Rinpoche has - along with co-author Eric Swanson - written a wonderful book. The Rinpoche's warmth & wisdom exude every page, flowing with what he terms 'essence love.' (The full title of the book is Open Heart, Open Mind: Awakening the Power of Essence Love.) Swanson's role in the book is not exactly described, even in his own note that appears at the beginning of the book, but from his remarks there it seems whilst he didn't translate the work into English, some limited translating was undertaken. Perhaps he helped top gave the book its cohesive narrative - if so, he did a wonderful job! Whatever the case, the book is presented as the thoughts, experiences and teachings of Tsoknyi Rinpoche, and so from herein this review will refer to him alone as its author. Tsoknyi has a delightful openness in describing his own life, but always in relation to Buddhist teachings. So, for example, he writes extensively about his being declared a tulku (reincarnation of a Tibetan Buddhist master) as a child, but in doing so he also relates important ideas from the Tibetan tradition, as well as revealing his own very human responses to such a discovery. Born in 1966 in Nepal, Tsoknyi is the son of another Buddhist master called Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, who was a renowned teacher of dzogchen ('great perfection'), a subject that the author explains in the ! book. Th e author is the third incarnation of Tsoknyi Rinpoche, and is a tulku in both the Nyingma and Drukpa Kagyu traditions within Tibetan Buddhism, and holds official lineage in the Kagyu school. When he relates al this in the book, however, it is never with any sense of pomposity or self-importance, but with a down-to-earth candor. This apparent propensity to an open and honest sharing of his own life experiences to illustrate Buddhist ideas is a really engaging aspect to the book. So, for example, early on in its pages, in the chapter entitled 'The Bridge,' he relates the story of when he was too scared to cross a thick glass bridge between two skyscrapers. It was only at the third attempt that he managed to traverse its transparent length, having contemplated the other people passing over it, and then reflecting upon himself. Elsewhere, he writes lovingly of his marriage and two daughters, and how feelings of love and compassion were awoken in him when cradling the latter. Here's an extract from the book that illustrates his warm and personal style: "I had never been on a train before. I'd heard about trains from my grandfather, who'd traveled on one several years earlier. He described it as something like a line of houses, each about the size of ours in Nubri, which traveled on wheels along metal rails. The image worried me. How could a house move on wheels without cracking and breaking? I approached the possibility of traveling in a house on wheels with some trepidation, influenced by imagination. When I saw the train with my own eyes, I realized it was made of metal, not wood and stone, and my notion of traveling in a moving house was put to rest by actual experience. it was then that I began to discern the difference between imagination and reality - the beginning of a long process that has led me to understand the ideas about who we are and what we're capable of achieving are based on misconceptions, on stories we're told by others, enhanced by the fertility of imagination that is one of the gifts of openness and clarity." (Open Heart, Open Mind p.83) So, having established the style of Tsonyi Rinpoche's writing, let's take a closer look at the teachings themselves. The subtitle of the book refers to 'essence love,' but what exactly is it? Deriving from the Tibetan term nying-je, which Tsoknyi describes as "an unconditional kindness, gentleness, and affection born of openness and intelligence" (Ibid. p.61). He goes on to say that essence love is a basic sense of well-being for oneself and others, and that it comes out of the realization of emptiness and clarity. These qualities are related to dzogchen, referred to above in reference to Tsoknyi's father. The author also puts much emphasis on 'the great perfection,' and there is a beautiful sequence in which he describes teachings on it from his father, who related dzogchen to the spaciousness of the sky in relation to the clouds that float through it: "Yes, look how they're changing. But the space beyond them hasn't changed at all. That space is like your essential nature. It doesn't change. It doesn't have a beginning or an end. Just as clouds pass through the sky, sometimes covering it completely, space is always there, in our hearts, in our minds, in all of our experience." (Ibid. p.187) Inspiring stuff indeed, but as Tsoknyi notes in his narrative, such statements can appear coldly abstract if not realized in actual experience. Following on from his father's wise counsel above, the author relates how he went outside on a cliff edge and actually watched the sky with its ever-moving, ever-changing contents. He then noticed how the contents of his mind, his thoughts and emotions were essentially the same as those clouds, which resulted in a clarity and freedom from the negative feelings that he had been experiencing up to that point. Merely describing his own experiences, however inspiring they may be, will necessarily help his reader to share in these realizations; thankfully, Tsoknyi includes practical instructions in the book, as well, such as this mindfulness practice he calls 'scanning': "Assuming a stable and comfortable posture is a good start in terms of aligning the mind and the body. The actual practice involves a few different methods, the first of which is an easy exercise in what may be called 'scanning,' a very simple handshake between the mind and the body. Lightly draw yo! ur atten tion to your body from the top of the head to the tip of the toes. Don't focus too intently on any part. Just bring a bare attention to each area. Sometimes, of course, a physical sensation of discomfort will arise; that's normal. But it's not necessary during this exercise to dwell on such sensations or go looking for the causes. Instead, just note the experience and move on to the next part of the body - shaking hands so to speak, with every part: 'This is my forehead. How do you do, forehead?' 'This is my nose. How do you do, nose?' For the practice known as mindfulness to have any effect, we need to learn to be polite toward the experiences we discover in the scanning process. Maybe someday politeness will be the word used instead of mindfulness. But before that can occur, we need to reach across the islands of discontent within ourselves and shake hands between our experiences and the stories that surround our experiences." (Ibid. pp.126-127) Hopefully, this review has given the reader a taste of the warmth & wisdom of Tsoknyi Rinpoche, as found in Open Heart, Open Mind. The teachings and practices that he presents in this wonderful book are potentially both life-enhancing & transformative - even enlightening. Allied with the easy and entertaining manner in which he communicates his teachings, this encouragement to awaken to our spaciousness and the essence love that flows from it form a powerful message indeed. Open Heart, Open Mind is a work wor! thy of o ur careful attention, and in the spirit of openness that it promotes, it is a book that can benefit anyone that reads, whether Buddhist or not. A fine work. Title & Author : Open Heart, Open Mind, by Tsoknyi Rinpoche Publisher : Harmony Books Page Count : 272 Price : $ 18:95 ISBN : 978-0-307-88820-4 Web Link : Open Heart, Open Mind at Harmony Books  
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