In his new book The Engaged Spiritual Life: A Buddhist Approach to Transforming Ourselves and the World, Donald Rothberg sets out ten basic principles for socially engaged spiritual life. He shared these with us this last weekend. (I believe he co-wrote these ten with a partner, but her name escapes me). Resisting the urge to make my own comments, I wanted to offer them for your own consideration and contemplation, with a few words that Rothberg added during the retreat:

1) Establishing Your Own Ethical Guidelines on the personal, relational, and collective levels.
2) Mindfulness practice both on the cushion and off- honest relationship to what is happening in the moment.
3) Clarifying motivation/ Setting intentions
4) Opening to pain and suffering (ie unpleasant, uncomfortable, unsatisfactory conditions), first on the cushion and then off.
5) Balancing the care of self and of other (note: the traditional pali word for "equanimity" is UPEKA- meaning balance)
6) Open mindedness "Not knowing and keeping going"
7) Interdependence/Interbeing the honest contemplation and eventual understanding of our integral relationship to the people around us, our environment, and the whole world.
8) Transforming anger (and the negative emotions) these emotions are our strength as well as poisons. how do we transform them into skillful action? (hating anger is not so wise, wha?)
9) Acting from a place of equanimity
10) Deep commitment to action without attachment to outcome (as one Sri Lankan (?) activist said: "What we need is a five hundred year plan for social reform!")

I want to thank everyone at DIY for supporting me in my retreat with Donald Rothberg last week. Special thanks to Rachel Lewis and Brian Williams, to Westcoast Dharma, and to Donald Rothberg himself for coming to town to share his work on meditation and social action.

found this letter by surprise, and was surprised into thinking again. it's by a Buddhist talking about the recent violence in Tibet and really shaking up my image of things. please read it and see what you think. so easy to have compassion for those we automatically think are right! so much harder to take a second look.

From Pema Chodron's Comfortable With Uncertainty:

There are three habitual methods that human beings use for relating to troubling habits such as laziness, anger, or self-pity. I call them the three futile strategies- the strategies of attacking, indulging, and ignoring.

I heard a talk by Robert Thurman some years ago at Carleton U in Ottawa. Most of it is totally lost to me now, but he mentioned one thing I found interesting. He said, "Buddhist societies, like the one in Tibet, are built entirely on the principle of the free lunch." (ok. I paraphrase). Remembering that single memorable line, I wanted to share this bit from my Conze book:

Chogyam Trungpa again:

When you slouch, you are trying to hide your heart, protecting it by slumping over. But when you sit upright in the posture of meditation, your heart is naked. Your being is entirely exposed- to yourself, first of all, but to others as well. Through the practice of sitting still and following your breath as it goes out and disolves, you are connecting with your heart. By simply letting yourself be, as you are, you develop genuine sympathy toward yourself. When you sit erect, you proclaim to yourself and the the rest of the world that you are going to be a warrior, a fully human being.

I for one am of the "life is dhukkha" school, rather than the "life contains dhukkha". While it is true that there are both pleasant and unpleasant experiences in life, the Buddha taught that either choice was unsatisfactory, full of stress, full of suffering, both in the moment and in the end. I think it's part of what he meant when he said his teaching was against the stream. Somehow I don't think it's enough to get the best life we can get. We have to go beyond that and see how it's all a game you can't win. It's all dhukkha.

From my Shambhala: Sacred Path box set, another nibble of Chogyam Trungpa to ring in the Year of the Rat.

Reading a Philip Moffat talk from Yoga Journal on Expectations, I came across this little ditty that made me giggle, in a very "ouch" kind of way.

He was talking about expectations in spiritual practice, and what the Vidyadhara called "spiritual materialism"- when we use spiritual practice as a means of securing our ego, and confirming things are what we want/expect them to be, rather than as a way to cut through and let go of that bovine excrement.
Here are some of the signs he has seen of spiritual materialism and expectations invading your practice:

Felt all inspirated after sharing this practice with folks at our Sunday sit, so I thought I'd share it here.