Delighted to share the news of a dear friend and practitioner of many years, Margaret Crouch’s new collection of poetry based on the Lojong, (Mind Training) teachings. Each poem is a response to one of the 59 slogans/maxims that make up the Seven Points of Mind Training from Shamar Rinpoche’s Path to Awakening. You can find the book here:
It is with a heavy heart I share the news that our dear friend and Dharma brother, Don Erway, passed away last month on March 1. Don was a member of our sangha and a friend to many. His kindness and generosity were expressions of his character. Don was a part of many of our retreats, even joining from Hawaii on Zoom. He was also a regular attendee of our weekly meetings on Zoom. We will miss him dearly. I leave you with a poem he wrote for our 2020 Heart of Practice retreat:
Tiny spiders to us
Is like us
To thousand year old redwoods.
–Aloha, Don
Please keep him in mind and in your hearts throughout the next few weeks and beyond.
Falling back one sees The great vastness is infinite I Spring forward! – Sherab Wangchuk
The seasons can be a wonderful reminder for us of the impermanent nature of all we experience. Yet, we still seem to forget and struggle. But even the struggle, or what the Buddha described as suffering, is impermanent. In one of the early Pali discourses, Dukkhatāsutta, the Buddha described three kinds of suffering. The suffering of pain, the suffering caused by conditioned existence, and the suffering due to change. Pain is pretty straightforward.
A headache can be very painful. Straightforward pain. Conditioned existence points to the fact that everything depends on, everything. Everything is everything. If we investigate, can we find any “thing” that is independent of any other “thing”? The truth is that any “thing” is in “dependence” on other things. That is why all the great masters say we will never find true happiness in samsara, the wheel of existence.
Temporary happiness, perhaps. But its nature is suffering. Why? Because it is conditioned. Bound to change. The good news? Pain is also conditioned. And will shift, sooner or later. And that brings us to the third kind of suffering, change. Let’s look again at the change of seasons. Is the nature of winter suffering? Ultimately, no. Relatively? It depends! We might suffer (pain) from the freezing temperatures. Or we might be avid skiers and enjoy the winter wonderland! The same for conditioned existence. We might be happy that winter is a conditioned phenomenon and therefore will not last or we might be unhappy that the winter fun is over. It changed. We might think “I don’t like winter and I’m happy when it changes to warmer weather.” But we forget or ignore that the warm weather will eventually change.
So, what is it that helps us realize the truth of suffering? As my teacher would say, “Awareness, awareness, awareness!” And how wonderful, that the world is not worried that we sometimes forget. It just keeps doing its thing. Reminding us. We can embrace the change of seasons. Notice the changes in temperature. The wildflowers bloom. Notice the leaves changing colors as Autumn approaches. We can say it’s effortless. If we examine, it actually takes more effort to struggle and suffer with change. The world just does its thing. And all we have to do is pay attention. Keep the light of awareness on. Daylight savings tells us to change our clocks. Fall back, Spring forward. Awareness has room for both.
– Jampa
From the Long Beach Meditation April 2023 Newsletter
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