Does transformation have to be a complete life makeover? Do you have to radically alter everything you do in the search for authentic spirituality? Caroline Myss says that the opposite is true.
In this short teaching, Caroline offers a way that you can take just one minute to make a profound change in your life—and deepen your connection to an essential part of who you are.
Friends, we are very happy to be releasing this new collection of teachings from Pema Chödrön entitled The Truth of Our Existence: Four Teachings from the Buddha to Illuminate Your Life.
What would happen if we looked with fresh eyes at the struggles and “impossible situations” that we face every day—and found there four gifts that changed everything?
For decades, Pema Chödrön has brought clarity and heart to the core teachings of the Buddha, helping to make them relevant and useful in our everyday lives. With The Truth of Our Existence, she immerses us in one of Buddhism’s essential distillations of written wisdom known as The Four Marks of Existence. These marks that shape all of us, teaches Pema, are like forgotten gifts waiting to be found. And while they may ring familiar to some, they hold vast layers of often unrealized understanding to both new and seasoned ears alike.
Please enjoy a free video teaching from Pema on Embracing Intensity, a core teaching how we can turn towards even the most difficult experiences in our lives—and how these experiences can serve as the doorway to our awakening.
Enjoy this short teaching from poet, philosopher, and bestselling author Mark Nepo, on the journey of inner courage. No matter where we are in our lives, we all have an edge that we’re being asked to grow at and explore. In order to make genuine contact with life, we must learn to listening with our hearts and to somehow stay open to whatever life presents.
In this video, Mark shares his understanding of courage along with a simple practice for opening to its presence in our daily lives.
One of the most important questions we can ask ourselves on the spiritual journey, according to Adyashanti, is: What is it that I really want? Spending some time sitting quietly and contemplating this question – allowing it to take us into the depths of being – is a practice that each of us can do to learn more about what it is that is really inspiring and driving us at the deepest levels. Many of the world’s great wisdom traditions suggest a similar inquiry, and consider this question the foundation of any authentic spiritual life.
So, friends, what is it that you really want? When all is said and done, what is your heart calling out for, where are you being pulled, what is pushing you, what will this life sweetest, most precious, rare human life be organized around?
We shot this video with our dear friend Adya at the first Wake Up Festival in 2012, where Adya opened our gathering in the gorgeous Rocky Mountains. We’re really happy that Adya will be joining us this year for our very special Wake Up event in San Francisco, on June 28. Please stay tuned for more information about this new program, featuring Adya and singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette.
You thought that as you awakened, you would feel less. But you are seeing that love continues to ask you to feel more. There was an idea that as your heart opened, your vulnerability would lessen, but you are more raw and tender now than you’ve ever been. You wondered if as you grew spiritually, you would be more detached, not care quite so much, and rest as the “witness” of your life from beyond it all. But, alas, you care so much you are burning up inside.
Something new is being born in you, but something else is dying. Everything you thought you needed is falling away, but what it is being replaced with is not yet clear. You are between the worlds, dancing between broken and whole, with light and dark being weaved within you.
You are so open it is almost as if a certain kind of sadness has come to permeate your life. Even the light in the snow, the color in the sunset, or the wind passing is almost too much; you are not sure you can let it in all the way. Even the orange and the red in the sky, if you let it come inside, might take you to the ground. There is a sense that you could die of astonishment at just how much grace is here. There is a purple that has never, ever come into being until now; give everything to know it. It is so precious here. The beloved is pouring colors throughout this dimension so that she may evoke her qualities in your body and through your senses.
You know that things will never be the same again, but you still do not know what is coming next or even where you are, or what is truly being asked of you. This unknowing groundless ground is your home now, and the creativity and the intelligence here are overwhelming. Yes, things are colored by a certain fragrance of sadness, but it is a sadness the mind could never know, for it has nothing to do with something being missing. It is a sadness which is pouring out of your overflowing heart. You are willing to give your heart to others and to this world, for you are seeing that this is why you have come here.
I recently I came across a word I hadn’t heard since grad school: ekphrasis, a term used to describe writing (or other art) inspired by another work of art. Think Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” or Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” The list goes on (and perhaps it should even include such Quirk Classics as Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters…).
I find it fascinating that inspiration and creativity can dance in this way across cultures and ages. I think it’s beautiful when an artist can transcend time and space to commune with the spirit of another artist and with his or her creations. When done well, ekphrasis can serve to both honor, sustain, or even deepen an original vision but it can also take us in a completely different, perhaps contradictory or even comical, direction. It’s a cycle of sorts wherein art begets art, recognizes itself, and becomes expressed again in a unique way. Not to improve upon but simply to say, “and this too!”
I suppose one could make the argument that ekphrasis has a place on the spiritual path as well. (In fact, in ancient Greece the word was originally used as a device to call out or give name to the inanimate…check out Plato’s Republic if you’re bored some time…) When we come across an individual who we deem a master of living, so to speak, they can become a source of inspiration for our own artful expression of who and what we are as we go about our days. When we identify ourselves as a Buddhist, Christian, Jew, and so on, perhaps that’s a type of ekphrasis as well.
What are some of your favorite instances of ekphrasis, in art or in other arenas? Have you ever created art inspired by art? I’d love to hear about it!
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