Kulaprabha

YOUR INVITATION from Maitrivajri

Compassion - it starts with the good enough heart, doesn’t it?

I remember reading that Chogyam Trungpa thought that many practitioners he meet in the West seemed to feel they needed a heart transplant, a different heart, in order to practice Dharma.

We are fortunate, the Buddha-Dharma is so clear, we each have the capacity to grow and open to our potential – like the pool of lotuses the Buddha saw as a symbol of the potential of each person – we each have a “good enough heart”

It’s simple really, a kind awareness is called for, a relationship with the heart we have, the world we move in, the hopes and fears we hold, the compassion that touches and moves through us. For it seems to me that it is out of this “good enough heart”, this authentic experience, that the Bodhichitta grows and reveals itself.

“The human heart can only find meaning in the smallest of moments”
(Mohinder Suresh, character from the T.V. series, “Heroes”, the first episode, I believe!).

We have a simple opportunity: to do retreat together, in the wild beauty of Akasavana, to find compassion in the “smallest of moments”. To allow the heart to reside in, and open to, the spacious fullness of the mandala of compassion practices (including metta, mindfulness, tonglen, and Bodhichitta meditations). To free, a little more, the good enough heart from views, memories, holdings-on and hurts that mean we forget that our “empty, open heart is suffused with the tenderness of true compassion” (Tsokyni Rinpoche, Carefree Dignity).

There will be silence, lots of it. There will be meditation and devotional practice. There will be space to follow the heart’s calling. There will be time for me to offer practice reviews. All dedicated for the benefit of all beings.

The Full Moon of the Dharma

They say the Dharma
Is an incomparable jewel found in a dung heap

They say the Dharma
Has only one taste, the taste of freedom

They say the Dharma
Falls like rain, on all

I feel the Dharma close
On those nights
When the full moon
Slips from the heavens
And enters my tender heart

To breathe compassion
Into the heartbeat
I share with the world.

Dh. Maitrivajri

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