#calm abiding

  I’ve been continuing my close reading of Atisha’s Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment. This is the root text for the many lamrim texts that followed. The copy I have includes the root text in both English and Tibetan, and a commentary by Geshe Sonam Rinchen (translated by Ruth Sonam). Last night’s reading included verse 38 38. Without the attainment of calm abiding, Higher perception will not…

ever notice how much more beautiful experience is if you are present to how things look, how the feel..and, how too much thought can distract from that direct, peaceful, experience?

tibetan buddhists call it  "calm abiding",

One year after the Boston Marathon bombing

Photo credit: Jeff Cutler (Flickr Creative Commons)

Ever since moving to Boston in 1999, I’ve been keenly aware of the ways in which I am separate from the city’s mainstream culture. As a queer woman, as a poet, as a [insert any one of a variety of labels that apply to me], I’m used to feeling different, apart, separate. About this time last year though, an odd thing happened.

In the hours and…