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LEVEKUNST art of life

SONG OF ENLIGHTENMENT

The Song of Enlightenment is a Chan Buddhist poem that dates back to the middle years of the Tang Dynasty. The text is attributed to the poet-monk Yongjia Xuanjue who was a disciple of Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch in the Chan line and the founder of the Southern School of Enlightenment, which puts him and this text in the direct up line of the great Zen tradition.

MEDITATING MORE THAN AN HOUR

If you are meditating to go beyond mindfulness, seeking insights, vipassana, then I recommend sitting for more than an hour because your mind needs time to let go, and then the really interesting things start.

LET’S PLAY

We sit in a circle. I wait until the group is silent, and then we begin. First I shake my hands in the air and the kids join in automatically. Then we tap on our knees, soft, louder, soft again, we tap on our chests and cheeks. The kids focus to not miss a gesture and follow the dynamics joyfully.

EXPANDING INTO THE UNKNOWN

I walked through life like a horse with blinkers on the side, not seeing clearly. But after this experience, between the majestic trees, I realized that I was not seeing through blinkers at all. Instead, I realized that my eyes had been covered over completely! I had been stumbling in the dark for all these years!

POEMS FROM A RETREAT CABIN

I sit in the same seat, staring at the same sky, as I have the last three years, on the bones of the morning, fleshing out with joyful diligence my heart’s expanse, that lucid cognizance, the sun’s rays bring to the sky.

AUTUMN WALK

As I walk on, streams of clouds sedately roll past on a pale blue sky illuminated by a milky-white sun. I center deeply in my breathing as if to gently cradle the world in my arms. For a split of a moment it seems that my consciousness is ceasing the subtle motion in all elements.

GOOD SEX

Sex is conscious. Breathing in, breathing out, presence, awareness. Trusting myself, trusting you. Vulnerable surrender, openness. Love resides here, where souls meet and bliss is never-ending.

THERE IS NO PUNISHMENT

When we encounter suffering in our lives, we sometimes incorrectly view it as punishment. For some of us, this comes from our childhood sense of a punishing God. We are suffering because God is punishing us for being bad. This is not a Buddhist view.

PARIS, CITY OF LIGHT

The melancholy and dark approach somehow fit the frustration and sadness that hit me in the light of the sad events that happened at venues, cafes and in the streets of Paris, November 13, 2015. This is a tribute to peace and the multicultural City of Light.

WHO ARE YOU? I AM CAESAR

Lying to ourselves, Every day in a million ways, Pretending to be a little more green, special, a little more enlightened, a little more yogi, pretending to be a little more wise, smart, tough, retrospective, wise­ass, noble, athletic, gentle, colloquial, worldly, competent, competitive.

WAKE UP TIME – THOUGHTS ON REINVENTING SOCIETY

When we look at our own lives, and at the world in general, the fact that we are ‘sleeping’ stands out very clearly. We live in a world in deep crisis. It is like a violent nightmare that requires us to wake up; as in truly wake up. We are like sleepwalkers, walking closer and closer to the edge.

HOW TO RECEIVE

When a woman receives, at that very moment it becomes part of her. Just as the child is received, it’s not foreign or alien. It is part of her being and she nourishes it. It has been absorbed. Nothing is added on. It’s part of the feminine body. Now, she is a creator and slowly the child grows within.

A CHARIOT FOR KNOWLEDGE-HOLDERS

The voice belongs to a yogi. He has for some reason felt compelled to give me a small stack of single sheets of script in Tibetan writing or print. He disappears right away into the mist. I sit in a little cave above the Lotus Lake in Himachal Pradesh and happily open up the cloth-wrapped stack of pages.

AWARENESS IN THE CLASSROOM

Practicing mindful breathing, sitting, walking and communicating, students can discover that there are so many things in their daily lives to notice, to enjoy, to explore. In fact everything inside and outside, everything in their life experience and everything in their surroundings are changing and impermanent.

GRIEF OF YOUR SPOUSE

A heart-rendering documentation of loosing the person closest to you. I held his hand all night, we talked, actually I talked, he was in a coma, I pretended he remembered and we laughed a bit, I told him how much I would miss him, how I was a strong woman and he knew I would be okay. Boy did I lie.