READ: Compassion The Dalai Lama Way by Ed and Deb Shapiro

Shortly after we were married we went to India and spent our honeymoon in ashrams and monasteries, and then in McCleod Ganj, where the Dalai Lama lives in exile in northern India along with other Tibetan refugees who have escaped Chinese rule in Tibet. Once there we went to the Office of Securities to request a meeting with the Dalai Lama.

The following day we were scheduled for an interview. While we were waiting Ed was standing on the veranda of the Dalai Lama’s palace, which is really a very large bungalow. “I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the vast Himalayan mountain range stretching in front of me. Then I saw a monk at the further end of the veranda trying to get my attention and beckoning me to come. I called for Deb, thinking we were being taken in to see the Dalai Lama, but as we approached the monk we realized that the beckoning monk was the Dalai Lama!”

In traditional Buddhist custom, we immediately began to prostrate but he took our hands and lifted us up, saying, “No, we are all equal here.”

For Deb this was a powerful reminder of our real oneness. For Ed he felt he was with the most compassionate being he had ever met. “The Dalai Lama made me feel as if I was the most important person in the world, as if nothing mattered more than the three of us being together. He radiated kindness and true presence.”

We both saw the meaning of real compassion in him, someone who was so ordinary, so simple, and his feelings for others so genuine. We spent about 45 minutes talking with him. Looking into his eyes, we could saw all of the suffering of the world as well as oceans of compassion. In Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama is known as Chenrezig, which means the Embodiment of Compassion, but as he says himself, “My religion is kindness.”

Compassion is probably the most important quality any of us could live by as it allows us to live with sanity and love. It is the wish that all beings be free from suffering. And that includes ourselves.

Every time we see suffering, every time we feel suffering in either ourselves or another, every time we make a mistake or say something stupid and are just about to put ourselves down, every time we encounter the confusion and difficulty of being human, every time we see someone else struggling, upset or irritated, we can transform it into acceptance, loving kindness and compassion, for that is also who we are. Just a few breaths of compassion will bring armfuls of understanding and caring into any situation. We can be compassionate because it is the foundation of who we are. It’s like a band-aide made in the heart.

Any of us are capable of losing our cool, losing connectedness to our hearts, losing perspective, getting caught up in hot emotions and causing harm. That is why compassion for ourselves is as important as compassion for others. Self-compassion enables us to transform fear, anger or resentment into forgiveness, acceptance and friendliness. By knowing our own pain and conflict, so we can more easily offer compassion to others.

Compassion is the willingness to witness and be present with whatever we see around us, not to turn away or pretend it’s not there: the hungry, the victims of abuse, the injustice, the senseless fighting, the homeless, the fear of the enemy. It is easy to feel hopeless, to want to walk away from it all, but compassion means we can’t be indifferent and uncaring. In recognizing our essential interconnectedness we can’t separate ourselves from anyone else. We are all here together and the least we can do is offer a helping hand.

Ed and Deb Shapiro are the authors of BE THE CHANGE, How Meditation Can Transform You And The World, with forewords by the Dalai Lama and Robert Thurman and Winner of the 2010 Nautilus Gold Book Award. Deb is the author of the bestselling book, YOUR BODY SPEAKS YOUR MIND, winner of the 2007 Visionary Book Award. They are featured bloggers on Oprah.com/spirit, HuffingtonPost.com/Living, and Care2.com. They have 3 meditation CD’s: Metta — Loving Kindness and Forgiveness; Samadhi – Breath Awareness and Insight; and Yoga Nidra – Inner Conscious Relaxation. See: www.EdandDebShapiro.com

 

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If You’re Not Here Then Where Are You? by Ed and Deb Shapiro

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.  John Lennon

Who said life would be like walking the yellow brick road, or that the human condition would be easy? And why is it so important to be here? What’s the big deal? It appears that the reason we’re not happy is because we long for things to be other than they are. We’re not satisfied being here. Not satisfied being with what is. We want things to be different, because we believe that if they were we would be happier. Therefore, we’re not truly present with our reality.

Why is Love so Painful? by Pragito Dove

Love is painful because it creates the way for joy, for ecstasy, for bliss. Love is painful because it transforms you. Love is growth.

Love itself does not hurt. It is growth that hurts, the ego that stings.

Each transformation is painful because the old situation is being left behind for the new. Hence, fear arises.

The real problem is the mind. Fear lives in the mind and the mind wants you to hang on to a situation that is known and comfortable for you. The ego-mind resists change because it is afraid of losing control and feels insecure about the unpredictability of the unknown. Love means the death of the ego because love cannot be controlled, it can only be received, accepted. Love is fragile. One day it is there, the next day it may be gone, like the wind. We cannot grasp the wind in our fist. We can only enjoy and appreciate it while it is there.

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READ: Sex, Love, and Spirit by Mahasatvaa Ananda Sarita

Evolution is an integral aspect of each life form. We evolve physically, mentally and spiritually, in ever ascending spirals, moving from order to chaos, and from chaos to a higher level of order, and so on ad infinitum. The chaos factor is necessary, in order for old patterns, which no longer serve us, to break down and dissolve. As we discover how to accept these life changes and learn from them, life becomes ever more rich and inspiring with each new cycle.

An area where evolution of body and psyche is very apparent is the arena of relationship. It is considered normal for two people to feel sexually attracted to each other, and jump into bed to experience sexual ecstasy together. The heat of sexual experience, if lived deeply and totally, will naturally give rise to feelings of love and a desire for emotional intimacy. The couple may then decide to live together, and explore the shift from ‘honeymoon hormones’ to ‘nesting hormones.’ This phase may include giving birth to children and raising them. However, life should not end there.

In the usual scenario, a couple will move from parenthood to grandparenthood, and from there into old age and into assisted living, waiting for inevitable death. This pattern brings with it, feelings of depression and even desperation, the reason being that life has much more to offer. And if we do not live what is offered by existence, we feel, quite rightly, like we have missed the train.

If individuals and couples learn meditation and apply this to sexuality, love and relating, as happens in Tantra, a wonderful opportunity opens up. Powerfully lived sexuality, coupled with awareness, naturally blossoms into love. And when love is deeply lived as a path of meditation, it very naturally evolves into prayer. My definition of prayer is, when each cell of the body is attuned to source, and we sense ourselves to be an open conduit for ever-flowing divine energy.

Sex, love and prayer is all the same energy, lived in different ways. It is like having a 3-story house. It is the same house, but the experience of the 3 floors will each be uniquely different. Our life experience goes on expanding to include more of our evolutionary potential. In this sense, as we get older, we do not have to degenerate, but can continue to evolve, discovering more of who we are in relation to the whole.

That is why, in our ancestral past, elders were highly respected. It was understood that they had evolved into higher wisdom, having more of an overview of the full spectrum of life.

And there is another step, which is even more profound than linear evolution. If we are able to expand our consciousness to include all three aspects at once, we become one with all that is. The merging of sexuality, love and spirituality as one organic unity, is an enlightened state of consciousness. It is a big yes to life in it’s totality.

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WOMEN’S SEXUAL ANATOMY

Sarita is a world renowned Tantra master and mystic offering courses and retreats across the globe. Having received a direct transmission from Osho, she is true to the spiritual essence of Tantra and leads us on the path to self realisation. At the same time she takes care to help us transcend the psychological blockages that we carry as a result of our cultural background and past experiences. She is also a master healer, author and consultant. website: http://www.tantra-essence.com

 

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Tantra and the Divine Feminine by Mahasatvaa Ananda Sarita

In the last 2000 years or so, women have been considered to be the weaker sex in much of the so-called civilized world. In actual fact, women have simply forgotten how to access their own power, the Divine feminine. In Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, he says:

Tantra and the Divine Masculine by Mahasatvaa Ananda Sarita

The Divine Masculine is a timely subject for 2012, as this is the year when the old world transmutes into a new world, according to the famous Maya predictions. Bring it on! The old world has been dominated primarily by an imbalanced masculine, which shows itself in the number of wars and general raping of planetary resources. This has happened because the masculine has been divorced from the feminine for a few thousand years, and by so doing has gone into a fevered testosterone fueled orgy of competition and destruction. I am by no means saying,…

READ: What Does Karma Yoga Mean? by Ed and Deb Shapiro

If we act with kindness and without focusing on ourselves, happiness will arise naturally, like a flower opening in the sun.

Some people think that yoga means stretching, bending and twisting like a pretzel, or sitting crossed legged with our eyes closed and chanting Om. But if that is all we did we would be no use to anyone. We spent our honeymoon in India and lived at the Bihar School of Yoga, where the foundation of our training was karma yoga. This was brilliant, as it gave us the opportunity to deepen our understanding of what it really is.

Many great yoga masters have said that the greatest path of yoga is karma yoga, as it is the one that asks us to be the least me-centered. The teaching is very explicit regarding karma yoga, which is described as the path of action and selfless service, to renounce our own selfish pursuits and not to reap the fruits of our actions. Brad Pitt’s selfless work building houses in New Orleans, or yoga teacher and activist Seane Corn’s work with Youth AIDS are expressions of karma yoga. ”I realized that whether my yoga practice was fifteen minutes or four hours was irrelevant because it was not about how yoga can change me,” says Seane in our book, Be The Change, “but how I, through this practice, can begin to change the world. What I really felt was how dare I not step into the world and hold that space?”

Start by practicing selfless service for a day, giving in whatever way you can by offering kindness. How does it feel? Just one day of this can be transforming, so try doing it once a week. It doesn’t mean you have to deny or ignore your own needs—you are just as important as everyone else. But just for this time let it not be about you.

Tai chi teacher Arthur Rosenfield was in the drive-thru line at Starbucks. The man in line behind him was getting impatient and angry, leaning on his horn and shouting insults at both Arthur and the Starbucks workers. Keeping his cool, Arthur paid for the man’s coffee and drove away. When he got home later that day, he discovered that he had created a chain of giving that had not only continued all day but had been highlighted on NBC News. Within twenty-four hours it had spread around the world on the Internet.

“Everybody can be great… because anybody can serve,” said Martin Luther King. “You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”

Karma yoga is creating goodness in the world. Do you treat your world with kindness or with aggression? Giving without any thought of getting is the most powerful act of generosity as it is unconditional, unattached, free to land wherever it will. But generosity can also raise fears about not having enough. Watch where resentment creeps in and remember that selfless action is just that: selfless.

On our morning walk through the alleys near our house we came across a back yard filled with used bicycles. Finally we met the owner. He had a bicycle shop in town and was collecting all these used bikes, repairing them, and then donating them to an Indian reservation in Montana. His goal was that everyone at the reservation, young and old, should have a bicycle of their own.

We see it in author Marc Barasch, founder of Green World Campaign. He decided that, “instead of cutting down trees to put words on a page, I wanted to plant some actual trees in the ground.” This year the nonprofit will plant millions of trees throughout the developing world, revitalizing barren land, helping sustain poor villages, and combating climate change. The slogan is, It’s amazing what one seed can grow.

And there is Aileen, a friend from England. In the last ten years she has created a farm in rural India. She sent us a photo showing her planting ‘flame of the forest’ tree seeds into starter pots. When these seeds become saplings they will be distributed to local school children so that each child will have their own tree to grow and tend.

Serving enables us to step beyond our own desires and to release any sense of separation. It takes us out of selfishness and neediness, and in the process we see our own self-centeredness in greater perspective. We discover that in giving we do not have any less. Rather, we gain so much. Let everything we do be of benefit to others.

Ed and Deb Shapiro are the authors of BE THE CHANGE, How Meditation Can Transform You And The World, with forewords by the Dalai Lama and Robert Thurman and Winner of the 2010 Nautilus Gold Book Award. Deb is the author of the bestselling book, YOUR BODY SPEAKS YOUR MIND, winner of the 2007 Visionary Book Award. They are featured bloggers on Oprah.com/spirit, HuffingtonPost.com/Living, and Care2.com. They have 3 meditation CD’s: Metta — Loving Kindness and Forgiveness; Samadhi – Breath Awareness and Insight; and Yoga Nidra – Inner Conscious Relaxation. See: www.EdandDebShapiro.com

 

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Why Yoga Is So Misunderstood ~ How It Has Gone From the Sane to the Bizarre by Ed and Deb Shapiro

Yoga has come a long way from its roots in the east. As it has become more popular in the west teachers have added their own twist – both literally & figuratively. In the process of becoming so widespread, however, it often gets misunderstood by both teachers and practitioners…

Yoga ~ A Menopause Alternative to HRT by Mache Seibel M.D.

Twenty years ago during a particularly stressful period of work, I began taking a yoga class as a non-pharmacologic antidote. I was running a center for reproduction and women’s health, working 24/7 and needed a way to relax. I had the good fortune to enroll with a yogini named Hari Khar Khalsa, and I took classes from her for a period of time. One day after class I asked her if she would…

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READ: Seeing with New Eyes by Ed and Deb Shapiro

A monk asks, ‘Is there anything more miraculous than the wonders of nature?’ The master replies, ‘Yes, your awareness of the wonders of nature.’ Angelus Silesius

We lived in Dartmouth, Devon, on the south coast of England, and each day we would take walks along the gorgeous river Dart to the estuary. One day we were standing and gazing at the water when it struck us that though the river always looked the same, day after day, it was no more the same as it was even a second ago. It was constantly changing, always moving, always different.

Which is just like our thoughts and feelings. What we are thinking now instantly becomes a past thought. Can you remember what you were thinking that seemed so important just yesterday, let alone just an hour ago? Our feelings are always changing and moving. Who we are now is not who we were last year, last week, yesterday, even a few minutes ago. Already we have changed, moved to a different place inside ourselves.

When Ed looked at the river it was as if he was seeing with new eyes, free of the clutter of his own ideas, projections, judgments, or conceptions. When we can see in this way we find that the world is not quite as we had imagined it to be.

Normally we are looking through the lens of our own habitual patterns, conditioning, prejudices and needs, through past regrets or future hopes, but without any of these we find everything is constantly new and unknown. No longer the same boring sameness, each moment is infused with uniqueness.

You can experience this by imagining you have never been here before. Everything you see is completely new to you, completely unknown, waiting to be explored and discovered. Whether you are brushing your teeth, washing the dishes, or any other equally mundane act, you can see it completely through new eyes.

All you have to do is pay attention and look without expectation. By paying attention you see yourself and others and all things just as they are, which enables you to see the inherent beauty within each one.

Being aware in this way extends you beyond yourself. It takes you out of the ego, out of the fixed way you believe things to be, out of self-centeredness and into awareness of connectedness, of yourself in relation to everything and everybody else.

A Walk On The Wild Side

Try taking a walk in nature – whether in a city park, through a wood, on a beach, by a lake. Make this time an opportunity to see with new eyes and to appreciate what you see: the colors and shapes, the smells and sounds.

Open yourself to the beauty of the natural world. If it is raining then enjoy the feeling of water on your face, appreciate how it is nourishing the earth and the plants; if it is windy then marvel at the power of nature, a force that is beyond your control; if it is cloudy then observe the subtle colors and the softness of the air. Be aware of each footstep.

Although we protect ourselves from nature with raincoats, boots, gloves and hats, we are a part of it and we need the nourishment of the earth, the plants, the sun, the wind and rain. Life is a treasure to be enjoyed. When we see with new eyes the world becomes the greatest of all gifts.

Ed and Deb Shapiro are the authors of BE THE CHANGE, How Meditation Can Transform You And The World, with forewords by the Dalai Lama and Robert Thurman and Winner of the 2010 Nautilus Gold Book Award. Deb is the author of the bestselling book, YOUR BODY SPEAKS YOUR MIND, winner of the 2007 Visionary Book Award. They are featured bloggers on Oprah.com/spirit, HuffingtonPost.com/Living, and Care2.com. They have 3 meditation CD’s: Metta — Loving Kindness and Forgiveness; Samadhi – Breath Awareness and Insight; and Yoga Nidra – Inner Conscious Relaxation. See: www.EdandDebShapiro.com

 

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Why Yoga Is So Misunderstood ~ How It Has Gone From the Sane to the Bizarre by Ed and Deb Shapiro

Yoga has come a long way from its roots in the east. As it has become more popular in the west teachers have added their own twist – both literally & figuratively. In the process of becoming so widespread, however, it often gets misunderstood by both teachers and practitioners.

Mindful Living – When You Need It Most by Jacquelyn O’Brien

Isn’t it unfair the way that life gets in the way of your practice? Whether you’re experiencing life challenges or pleasures, whether they’re large or small, they do have a habit of getting in the way of our time on the yoga mat or the meditation cushion.

 

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READ: God is IN the People by Jeff Brown

God is IN the People: An excerpt from ‘Soulshaping: A Journey of Self-Creation’

At the heart of Soulshaping is a profound faith in the human experience, in the karmic significance of our personal identity. This stands in real contrast to some of the detachment models that are gaining favor in Western culture. These models present true-path as something distinct from the emotional body, as though our usual self-identifications are inherently inauthentic, as though our physical forms are inferior. At the extremes, they seem to suggest that God made a mistake when she placed us in human bodies. These models worry me and present an image of heightened consciousness that often feels more robotic than human, more heady than hearty.

Soulshaping is not a detachment model. It is an immersion model. It is about jumping into life, immersing ourselves in our feelings and experiences in an effort to learn what we need to expand our soul’s consciousness. It is about “feeling” God, not “thinking” God. It is about honoring our personal identity and our physical form as not only the “vessel” for the soul, but as the embodiment of the soul as well. Embodied spirituality.

To be sure, there are times when detachment is necessary: when the suffering is too much, when we need a peek into a vaster reality. Indeed we are far more than our monkey mind, our neurotic attachments, our linear lens. But to live in perpetual detachment is to miss the moment altogether. It is to trip out of the body that carries the karmic seeds for our transformation. It is to leave Earth before our time.

The most inclusive answer is to work on eradicating our misguided notions of “I” until our notions of I-ness become directly linked to who we really are, to a conscious awareness of our soul-scriptures for this lifetime. To do this we may have to become initially effective at detachment techniques. But then, when we are ready, we come back down to Earth and work with what lives inside us. This means learning how to cultivate our bodies as gardens of truth. This means calling ourselves on our detachment from our shadow. This means doing the often-difficult work to clear our emotional debris and gain control over our relational patterns. We clear our emotional debris because it creates space inside for our authentic self to emerge, and also because inherent in those feelings and memories are the lessons we need to grow in our spirituality. Our thoughts are only illusions when they do not reflect who we really are, our emotions only wasteful when we are not seeing them all the way through to the spiritual lessons they contain.

When we are aligned with our authenticity, our feelings and thoughts become instruments of true-path, direct expressions of our highest intentions. In this more authentic state, we become much more effective at attracting what we want from a universe that is only interested in authentic expansion. Nothing feigned will do.

Our humanness is the “I” of the soul needle. It is our soul clay. It is the heart of our magnificence. God is in our humanness, God is in our connectiveness, God is in our broken hearts, God is in the people. I-God.

 

A former criminal lawyer and psychotherapist, Jeff Brown is the author of “Soulshaping: A Journey of Self-Creation,” recently published by North Atlantic Books. Endorsed by authors Elizabeth Lesser and Ram Dass, “Soulshaping” is Brown’s autobiography — an inner travelogue of his journey from archetypal male warrior to a more surrendered path. You can connect with his work at www.soulshaping.com

 

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YOU ARE SACRED PURPOSE by Jeff Brown

You are Sacred Purpose. You are not your shame, your fears, your addictions, your games, your guilt, the internalized remnants of negative messaging… You are not your resistance to your true path … You are not your self-doubt… You are not your self-distraction patterns. You are not your escape hatches… you are not your pessimism about a life of meaning and purpose. You are not here merely to survive and endure.

 

Are You Out of Your Mind? by Ed and Deb Shapiro

One of the most insulting things someone can say to us is, “Are you out of your mind?” implying we somehow mistaken or even crazy. But what if it is actually the coolest thing we could say? What if being out of our mind means we are not disturbed by the madness of our mind and are more in touch with our feelings, heart, and freedom?

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