What's love got to do with it?
A Challenge for July and August (if you choose to accept ...)
Can we commit to practicing love/metta regularly - with meditation or in other activities - doing something every day that expresses the choice to love?
Valarie Kaur: “imagine a critical mass of people across the nation and the world who are making love a conscious practice - block by block, heart to heart. What institutions will we build, what stories will we tell, what world will we birth?”
As buddhists we have these amazing practices - what if we all did them regularly for the next couple of months?
Weeks 7: Karunadevi - Equanimity and the Broad Band of Awareness — All about love
Resources:
Weeks 6: Viradhamma - Infinite Love
Resources:
Weeks 5: Mokshasi - Love, Impermanence and Surrender
Resources:
Weeks 3 and 4: Danadasa
Resources:
Week 2: Padmatara, Love and the Five Hindrances
Resources:
- Notes on the week's talk
- Analayo: Compassion and Emptiness in Early Buddhist Meditation, Windhorse Publications
Week 1: Padmatara, Defining Love
Resources:
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bell hooks: All About Love, and other books. NPR article: https://www.npr.org/2021/12/15/1064509418/bell-hooks-feminist-author-critic-activist-died (Prefers to spell her name with no capital letters as a way of de-emphasizing her individual identity)
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Gil Fronsdal article: https://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/books-articles/the-buddhas-teachings-on-love/
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Valarie Kaur: See No Stranger, a Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love. Also several YouTubes and website https://valariekaur.com/
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Bodhipaksa: https://www.wildmind.org
Provisional definitions
Love is a courageous choice we make over and over to act for our own or another’s spiritual progress. It’s fierce, bloody, imperfect, life-giving, and has the taste of freedom.
Choosing love relies on our capacity to empathize with ourselves and others, to see all of us as feeling beings inextricably connected, not separate. Practice disrupts, embraces and dissolves the habits that seem to get in the way.