Taking Responsibility - Pema Chodron

All activities should be done with the intention of speaking
so that another person can hear you, rather than using words
that cause the barriers to go up and the ears to close.  Everything
you say can further  polarize the situation and convince you
[and others] of how separate you are.  On the other hand,
everything you say and do and think can support your desire
to communicate from the Heart, to move closer and
step out of this myth of isolation and separateness that
 we're all caught in.

...you don't have to get frozen in [language] of
loser or winner,
good guy or bad guy...

We have two alternatives.  Either we hold onto our fixed versions
of reality, or we begin to challenge them, and start dissolving
the barriers that we erect between ourselves and the world.

Pema Chodron
Buddhist Teacher
From: Comfortable with Uncertainty

photo - two pieces of bread that look like faces
facing each other...

~

How We Get There - Fred LaMotte

We wonder why everyone is so stressed.  But many of us would
not know who we are without conflict...

Democrat against Republican, socialist against capitalist,
woman vs man, black vs white, vegan vs omnivore,
the enlightened vs the ignorant...

Maybe the answer is never one side vs the other.  Maybe we could
rest the [conflicted] mind in the Heart. Maybe we could all go meet
in Rumi's field, under the stars, beyond the ideas of right and wrong.
How can we get there?
Listen to the Silence.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

With great grief for the hatred and violence
in this country...

To feel one's grief is being authentic, allowing
yourself to feel another's grief, the collective grief
of people heartbroken from the trauma of violence. It
softens you, opens the heart and gives you a different lens
with which to see others with a sense of connectedness
and compassion; dissolving the barriers that separate,
allowing a different vision than your own dearly held beliefs
and opinions, whether spiritual or political.  And in that
is a deepening sense of inner peace and equilibrium...

~

2nd photo - the Om (Aum) symbol is a sacred symbol of the
universal name of God (or Ultimate Reality),
Om (Aum) is the ever present "sound"/vibration of
 an already unified Universe, which expresses itself dualistically
in our experience here.
When you are in meditative Silence, listening, you are aware
of it, the Universal Om - the Hum of the Universe.
  It pervades even the chaos,
and every "sound" becomes the sound of OM/Aum singing
the song of the Universe...  Just listen...
One experiences the wholeness of Life,
despite what is happening...
At least that it my experience.