Co-Meditate with your enemy (Lama Surya Das)

How do you learn to love your enemies or people who just piss you off? CJ shares her issues with Donald Trump to help kick off the meditation. Lama Surya Das, who Dali Lama calls the American Lama, steps us through a co-meditation. For more details visit here – http://www.fireitupwithcj.com/bodhichitta-tonglen-meditations-with-lama-surya-das/

The Future of Buddhism, Which is Now (Lama Surya Das )

The future of Buddhism - Which is now: Does Buddhism have to die to be reborn in the west?

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Lama Surya Das - Make Me One with Everything: Buddhist Meditations To Awaken From The Illusion of Separation

Date(s):  June 27 (Saturday)

Time:  10:00am - 4:00pm

Description: 

"Everything can be meditated - It's all grist for the mill, worthy of appreciation in its own way. Integrating the View, the bigger picture, the great perspective, with daily life." ― Lama Surya Das

THE DAYLONG -

In these disconnected, plugged-in yet simultaneously tuned-out times, this unity-yoga of converge-itation, inter-meditative interbeing, which I call co-meditation, is a simple joyful path to overcome the illusion of duality and experience the renowned one-taste of tantric Mahamudra and Dzogchen, the natural Great Perfection.

These practical inter-meditations and tantric exercises open portals to oneness in nature, with others, with your higher deepest power, and beyond notions such as distraction and concentration or the conceptual separation between the sacred and the mundane.

THE NEW BOOK - 

Make Me One with Everything

                               

This, my thirteenth book, is dedicated to InterMeditation, or meditating "with" - Awakening Together - the practice and art of intimacy and union with whatever is, just as it is.

ABOUT LAMA SURYA DAS: 

Lama Surya Das has spent over forty years studying Zen, Vipassana, yoga, and Tibetan Buddhism with the great masters of Asia, including the Dalai Lama's own teachers. He is an authorized lama and lineage holder in the Nyingmapa School of Tibetan Buddhism, and a personal disciple of the leading grand lamas of that tradition. He is the founder of the Dzogchen Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts and its branch centers around the United States. Surya has brought many Tibetan lamas to this country to teach and start centers and retreats over the years.

As founder of the Western Buddhist Teachers Network with the Dalai Lama, he regularly helps organize its international Buddhist Teachers Conferences. He is also active in interfaith dialogue and charitable projects in the Third World, and has recently turned his efforts towards youth and contemplative education initiatives, what he calls "True higher education and wisdom for life training."

Original Source - http://www.insightla.org/1788/make-me-one-with-everything-with-lama-surya-das

"Make Me One with Everything" Trailer

Lama Surya Das shares why he wrote his latest book "Make Me One with Everything: Buddhist Meditations to Awaken From the Illusion of Separation", available now from Sounds True- http://www.soundstrue.com/store/make-me-one-with-everything.html

Lama Surya Das presents "Make Me One with Everything"

Date: May 31, 2015 03:00PM -- May 31, 2015 04:00PM

Venue: The Concord Bookshop, 65 Main Street, Concord, MA, US

What did the Dalai Lama say to the hot dog vendor? "Make me one with everything!" It's a familiar joke, muses Lama Surya Das, and one that holds a profound truth: that in addition to inner peace, meditation is a path for all-inclusive connection. In Make Me One with Everything, he invites us to experience this through the art of inter-meditation and other original practices that allow us to see through the illusion of separation.

"If you've ever felt 'at one' with something-your beloved or your child, a forest trail or a favorite song-then you've experienced inter-meditation," explains Lama Surya Das. Based on Tibetan Buddhism's core insights into the inherent essence of who we are, these teachings of shared spirituality offer both new and experienced meditators a better way to live-not just on the meditation cushion or the yoga mat, but in every moment of their lives.

Lama Surya Das is one of the most learned and highly trained American-born lamas in the Tibetan Dzogchen tradition. He is the founder of the Dzogchen Center in Cambridge, Massachusettes and Austin, Texas. He is the author of many books, including Awakening the Buddha Within and Awakening to the Sacred. He lives in Cambridge.

Dzogchen Center Summer Meditation Retreat

Dzogchen Center Summer Meditation Retreat
with LAMA SURYA DAS

The Natural Great Awakening



We are all Buddhas by nature--we only have to awaken and recognize who we are and how we fit perfectly in this world. This is the teaching of the innate Great Perfection--Dzogchen. Introducing us to this natural wisdom and compassion is the life-work of Lama Surya Das. For the annual Summer Dzogchen Meditation Retreat, he will teach the View, Meditation and Action of the Great Perfection: timeless and inspiring heart-essence instructions passed down in this contemplative tradition for many centuries.

We invite you to join Dzogchen Lineage Holder Lama Surya Das for a week of awakening to the joy of naturally-arising timeless awareness. Lama Surya will teach throughout the week and offer lively Q&A sessions.  In addition to guided and silent meditations, dharma talks, heart-opening chanting and private interviews, this retreat will also feature optional and uplifting Tibetan Energy Yoga each morning.

Outside of the teaching hall, the precious gift of Noble Silence is observed, allowing us the peace and spaciousness to explore the mind, as well as to rest and retreat from the busyness of everyday life & chatter.

In addition to formal sessions, there is plenty of opportunity to enjoy the beautiful natural surroundings  preserved by the Open Space Institute on the banks of the mighty Hudson River. Those preferring to stay inside can relax in a lounge looking out, or browse selected postings in the retreat reading room.

Click here for information and registration - https://eventyard.net/events/conferences/dzogchen-center-summer-meditation-retreat-with-lama-surya-das/221110/

Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer

My Own Life

Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer

A MONTH ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. The radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye. But though ocular melanomas metastasize in perhaps 50 percent of cases, given the particulars of my own case, the likelihood was much smaller. I am among the unlucky ones.

I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”

“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”

I have been lucky enough to live past 80, and the 15 years allotted to me beyond Hume’s three score and five have been equally rich in work and love. In that time, I have published five books and completed an autobiography (rather longer than Hume’s few pages) to be published this spring; I have several other books nearly finished.

Hume continued, “I am ... a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions.”

Here I depart from Hume. While I have enjoyed loving relationships and friendships and have no real enmities, I cannot say (nor would anyone who knows me say) that I am a man of mild dispositions. On the contrary, I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.

And yet, one line from Hume’s essay strikes me as especially true: “It is difficult,” he wrote, “to be more detached from life than I am at present.”

Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.

On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.

Read more here - http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/opinion/oliver-sacks-on-learning-he-has-terminal-cancer.html