Spirituality & Practice

Bring a consciousness of sharing to everything you do. As the intention to share becomes part of your moment-to-moment awareness, perform acts of sharing whenever, wherever, and however possible.

"When a man heard noise coming from his yard, he looked out and saw neighborhood boys climbing up one of the fruit trees in the yard, trying to steal some fruits. So he went out into the yard and placed a ladder underneath the boys in the tree. He then quietly returned to his house. Is this not a stupid thing to do? The boys are stealing his fruits, but the owner does not stop them from committing an unlawful act. This man feared that when the children try to come down the tree, nervous about being caught, they might slip and fall, and hurt themselves. His impulse was to prevent them from being injured, not to save his property from thieves." To Practice: Share a story about a time when you were surprised by someone's kindness to you. Find a way to be kind to an unsuspecting person.

Usually our closets and drawers contain articles of clothing we have not worn in years. As an ongoing spiritual practice, resolve to give one article of clothing to the poor every time you buy or receive a new one. In other words, consider all new clothes as replacements for older clothing. If you cannot commit yourself to this, then perhaps once each season (mark your calendar ahead of time), go through your closets and give something to the poor.

Charitable Giveaways "Is there something you're symbolically releasing when you donate your clothes or personal items to a charitable organization? As you place the item in the collection box, think about what you are releasing and what you are affirming with that action. Make it significant to your mind. "A woman donated a hat that was too small for her head. She affirmed that she was releasing ideas that limited her intellectual and spiritual growth. A friend pinned a note on her deceased mother's coat before she donated it, wishing the new owner warmth and love, and signed it with her mother's name."

I think we need a new word — "comjoyment" — as a companion to "compassion" to remind us that our greatest gift to the world may be in sharing what gives us the greatest joy.

"So Much Happiness" by Naomi Shihab Nye "It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness. With sadness there is something to rub against, a wound to tend with lotion and cloth. When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up, something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change. "But happiness floats. It doesn't need you to hold it down. It doesn't need anything. Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing, and disappears when it wants to. You are happy either way. Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house and now live over a quarry of noise and dust cannot make you unhappy. Everything has a life of its own, it too could wake up filled with possibilities of coffee cake and ripe peaches, and love even the floor which needs to be swept, the soiled linens and scratched records. . . . "Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness, you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you into everything you touch. You are not responsible. You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it, and in that way, be known. [Commentary by Roger Housden] " 'With sadness there is something to rub against,' writes Naomi Shihab Nye. "Isn't that the truth! Sadness has a gravity that can weigh down both body and mind to such a degree that to think of anything else -- even to think of looking up -- can become almost inconceivable. Sadness can turn to self-pity and become a lid to seal away our happiness for years. Depression can become addictive, a whole way of life. . . . "Happiness, on the other hand, just happens, and in its own time and place. It comes and goes as it pleases, and all your personal will can do in response, Nye tells us later in the poem, is simply to shrug, . . . raise your hands . . . take no credit. . . . Happiness is far less tangible than sadness, more difficult to put your finger on, even to give a name to. It floats. We can have no control over it, and in this sense, happiness goes against the grain in Western culture."

This wonderful practice is one of the treasures of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. The adept who taught it to me in Ladakh told me: "I wish I could teach it to everyone on the earth! It would save hundreds of millions of lives! As a Tibetan who lived through the fall and destruction of my country and has had to endure exile, my life has been filled with various kinds of ordeal. This practice has never failed to lift my heart and strengthen my will." My Tibetan friend's enthusiasm delighted and infected me, and I began to do the heart practice very seriously that I now give. I had thought his claims for it exaggerated; when I came to practice it during my own times of ordeal, however, I found that its power to sustain and infuse me with hope was extraordinary." . . . Begin the practice by imagining yourself in a landscape you associate with peace and joy. The Tibetan who taught me this heart exercise used to stress how important it was to imagine yourself in a place that was already linked in your mind to happiness. . . . Choose, then , a place where you have felt close to God and your heart's own truest joy, and imagine yourself sitting quietly and peacefully in it. Allow the full beauty of the place to penetrate and inspire your every sense. Recall its scents and colors, its light, the contours of its perfection. Remember as richly and comprehensively as you can exactly how that place you have chosen made you feel when you were actually in it, how full of hope and gratitude. Allow the inner security you once felt in the place to infuse your whole being. When you are beginning to feel the charm of the place you have chosen start to work deeply upon you, imagine and invoke in a cloudless and brilliant blue sky in front of you that representation of the Divine that most moves you and with whom you feel most identified. This figure could be Jesus or the Buddha, Mary or Kali or Tara. The name and form of the divine being you choose is not as important as your deep love for him or her and your faith in his or her truth, power, goodness, and unconditional love for you. If for some reason you cannot or do not want to imagine any one divine form in this context, don't worry; invoke the Divine as a sun or blazing star or as a cloud of light. Whatever form or image you invoke, make sure that you do so as vividly as possible and that you feel with your inmost being that through whatever form or image you have chosen the Divine is appearing just for you to show you the boundless love it has for you. I find that it helps considerably at this moment to start to pray tenderly to whatever figure I have chosen. I find the simplest prayers work the best. I usually say something like "Thank you, my Beloved, for coming to me, for appearing to me when I asked you to. I am deeply and finally grateful. Open to me the treasure house of your heart, make me alive in truth and love." When your heart is completely open to the figure in the sky in front of you, start to speak inwardly to him or her. Speak without shame or fear, as if to your parent or closest friend or brother or sister. Don't edit your words or try to make them startling or eloquent; the divine figure in front of you knows already what is in your heart and wants you only to express yourself as honestly as possible. Speak out of the depths of whatever you are going through at the moment; don’t try to conceal any of the darkness of what you might be enduring. . . . It is essential that you pour out whatever is in you in a sacred atmosphere and before the One who you know loves you with unconditional tenderness and wants only your full growth and healing. . . . Speak, then, with total sincerity to the figure you have invoked to the sky in front of you about whatever is worrying you and whatever you feel you need help with. Imagine now that as you speak, the image or form you have chosen to represent the Divine begins to emit strongly a stream of radiant white light. Know that this divine light has infinite transforming and healing power and cannot be stopped in its effectiveness by any obstacles whatever. Know this, believe this with profound faith, and pray passionately to this light to enter you and posses you and infuse you and purify you of all blocks, difficulties, karmic obstacles, all illness of soul or body. As you pray, the form or image in front of you becomes more and more brilliant with light. Now the light enters you through the top of your head, and pours in pulsing, warm, sweet, blissful waves down the full length of your body, Let the divine light wash you completely. Keep calling out for help and guidance for whatever difficulty you wish to resolve or torment you long to heal. The light will go on getting brighter and brighter as you go on trusting it enough to call out to it and soon will be falling in great cataracts of power through your body. Each time the light pours through you in this vast wave of blessing, offer up to it one more grief or worry or dark impulse for healing and transformation. As the peace and solace this practice is bringing you deepen, allow yourself to relax as completely as you can into the bliss and protection of the Divine Presence. Allow yourself to feel how deeply and precisely you are loved. As you feel yourself melting away more and more in the presence of the form or image you have chosen, imagine that you leave the ground where you are sitting and "float up" quietly to where the figure or image you have chosen is standing in the sky. Now embrace the presence or image. If you have chosen Christ or Mary or the Buddha as your divine form, for example, imagine that you rest against his or her breast in a simple and naked embrace, and rest in its peace. When you feel yourself returning to ordinary consciousness, don't do anything hurriedly. Try to allow whatever you have to do after the practice to be permeated by the ease it has given you. As you begin to go about your life, say a prayer for all suffering beings everywhere and wish them healing and sacred joy and the knowledge that you have been given of the unconditional love and support of God. In your practice period you should allow the whole exercise to unfold gradually. During the day, however, you can use a shortened version of it to remind yourself constantly of divine help and guidance. The more seriously you practice the "long" version, the easier it will become to transport yourself immediately into this heart exercise's sacred atmosphere. Nowadays I find myself using this exercise all the time — when walking to shopping, or waiting for a telephone call, even during the commercials on TV or in the bath. Through it I try to keep in constant ordinary contact with the Divine, constantly open to the Presence in all activities and states of mind.

"The world's people, and the connections among us, provide the raw material for cognitive surplus. The technology will continue to improve, and the population will continue to grow, but change in the direction of more participation has already happened. What matters most now is our imaginations. The opportunity before us, individually and collectively, is enormous; what we do with it will be determined largely by how well we are able to imagine and reward public creativity, participation, and sharing. "For those of us over forty, exercising this kind of imagination requires conscious effort, because it's so different from what we grew up with. At NYU, where I teach, I get to see the world through my students' eyes by listening to them talk, reading what they write, and watching what they do. This gives me some sense of the world as twenty-five-year-olds see it, and it looks very different from (and mostly better than) the world I grew up in. But the potential for really radical change may be even better illustrated through the eyes of children. "I was having dinner with a group of friends, talking about our kids, and one of them told a story about watching a DVD with his four-year-old daughter. In the middle of the movie, apropos of nothing, she jumped up off the couch and ran around behind the screen. My friend thought she wanted to see if the people in the movie were really back there. But that wasn't what she was up to. She started rooting around in the cables behind the screen. Her dad asked, 'What you doing?' And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, 'Looking for the mouse.' "Here's something four-year-olds know: a screen without a mouse is missing something. Here's something else they know: media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those things make me believe that the kind of participation we're seeing today, in a relative handful of examples, is going to spread everywhere and to become the backbone of assumptions about how our culture should work. Four-year-olds, old enough to start absorbing the culture they live in but with little awareness of its antecedents, will not have to waste their time later trying to unlearn the lessons of a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island. They will just assume that media includes the possibilities of consuming, producing, and sharing side by side, and that those possibilities are open to everyone. How else would you do it? "The girl's explanation has become my motto for what we might imagine from our newly connected world: we're looking for the mouse. We look everywhere a reader or a viewer or a patient or a citizen has been locked out of creating and sharing, or has been served up passive or canned experience, and we're asking. If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen? I'm betting the answer is yes, or could be yes, if we give one another the opportunity to participate and reward one another for trying."

Return a lost object to your brother. It is a mitzvah to return a lost object. It is said that our belongings contain a portion of ourselves. It is crucial to make sure that each person has the things that belong to him or her. If you see something that has been lost, make sure you return it as quickly as possible. You can even go further with this mitzvah when you take note of anything that may have been lost by another and try to return it, such as self-worth, hope, joy in life, and inspiration.

An Excerpt from As You Grieve: Consoling Words From Around the World by Aaron Zerah Aaron Zerah has gathered a collection of prayers, poems, and stories from Native Americans, Africans, Buddhists, Moslems, Hindus, Jews, and Christians in this resource on grieving. Here is a traditional Zen Buddhist story that illustrates the spiritual practice of connections. "Soyen Shaku, the abbot, each morning took a walk accompanied by his companion from the monastery to the nearby town. One day, as he passed a house, he heard a great cry from within it. Stopping to inquire, he asked the inhabitants, 'Why are you all wailing so?' They said: 'Our child has died and we are grieving.' "The abbot without hesitation sat down with the family and started crying and wailing himself. As they were returning to the monastery, the abbot's companion asked, 'Master, is this family known to you?' 'No,' the abbot answered. 'Why then, Master, did you also cry?' The abbot said simply, 'So that I may share their sorrow.' "