Sangha of Auspicious Companions

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July 3, 2024

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The Night I Died

Tracy Cochran describes a night when she was robbed by three men while walking down a dark street. One held her in a chokehold that can kill in less than twenty seconds. During the chokehold, Tracy had what is described as “conscious dying, or transference of consciousness at the time of death, or even a flash of enlightenment without meditation.” She describes it in exquisite detail as a radiant light that “held everything that is. It was the alpha and omega, the particle and wave, the unifying force of the universe.” She survived, and both immediately and in the years that followed, found that many people did not believe her story. So, she only told it to people she trusted or that were dying. Yet, the experience never grew dim. She says, “What we really have to share is not any spiritual treasure we imagine we have stored up, but our poverty, our common human situation, our inability to know.” { read more }

Be The Change

Do you have a story or has someone told you a story that may seem unbelievable – outside of ordinary human experience? Share your own, or listen again. Open up to the possibility of greater awareness. For more inspiration, join an Awakin Call conversation with Tracy Cochran this weekend: { more }

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Inspiring Links of the Week

July 1, 2024

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Infinity of an Open Heart

Cynthia Li invites us along on an illuminating experience while kayaking in a wilderness. In the silence and blanket of darkness, she stops paddling and begins to drift. She feels suspended in the “dance of the oneness” — of past, present, and future. She feels both tremendous terror and tremendous freedom hoping to “trust enough in my aloneness to dissolve fully into this great emptiness.” Cynthia shares further how a path to that great emptiness is through the heart. The heart is “the strongest electromagnetic field in the body… sending and receiving, transforming energy with everything that it touches.” The heart empties and fills. She explains that if the heart holds onto attachments such as “I want this story” or “I like being full,” it cannot send. When we empty ourselves, when we connect to our hearts and the emptiness, it opens the space where “life can play and create itself, through me, through all of us,” and create a new story. { read more }

Be The Change

Stop paddling, and drift. Let go of any attachments your heart may be holding on to. Instead of “my heart is full,” say, “my heart is empty.” What life story fills into your heart space? Share the new story with someone.

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June 29, 2024

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Bringing France’s Waste Prevention Plan to Life

Andrée Nieuwjaer’s fridge is brimming with produce that she got for free. Last summer, she ate peaches, plums, carrots, zucchinis, turnips, and endives that local grocers couldn’t sell due to aesthetic imperfections or being slightly overripe. Nieuwjaer, a resident of Roubaix, France, transforms discarded bread into pudding and breadcrumbs that layer a casserole; diced beets into long-lasting pickles, figs into marmalade, and apricots into jams. Her enthused efforts are part of a broader governmental initiative on waste management aimed at a zero-waste, or zéro déchet, lifestyle. France, the first nation to ban supermarkets from throwing away unsold food, is setting the stage for a zero-waste future with groundbreaking policies that emphasize community-driven change. The country passed a landmark anti-waste law in 2020 outlining dozens of objectives for waste prevention, recycling, and repairability, and its waste-prevention action plan for 2021-2027 forges ahead further. Localized efforts, like those in Roubaix, highlight the effectiveness of community-driven behavioral changes. The national strategy involves multiple levels of governance and participation from citizens, businesses, and local authorities to meet ambitious waste-reduction goals. { read more }

Be The Change

Reduce your waste this week. Eat everything on your plate, plan ahead with reusable bags, containers and cutlery, and opt for items that come in less packaging.

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June 28, 2024

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The Whisper of Reverence

“Here, we rest in reverence,” writes Greta Matos, co-founder of CuraKuda. But where is here? Greta reflects about what it means to move with a herd of horses in Chile, and how different, yet similar that is to the life she once led. Greta now advocates for communing with nature where awe and reverence show up not through visits to the mountaintops, but in the long rides she takes, collaborative journeys alongside four-legged teachers. Movement is a part of the job, yet “yet there is always ritualistic space and time for rest and reverence” she writes. And while it is easy to lose site of ourselves in our structured worlds of interstates and byways, glass, concrete, and stone, focusing on the end goal “The intention […], must not be the destination, but instead, the relationality of the process.” { read more }

Be The Change

Pay attention to the herd of two-legged creatures you walk alongside today. What about their activities reflects them? Take a moment to notice someone and their story unfolding in front of you. How does it fit into the broader herd as a reflection of their own creative contribution? Note what you revere about their actions.

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Plastic Man

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June 27, 2024

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The Solutionary Way

Zoe Weil had forty-five youngsters identify the world’s biggest problems, and was surprised when only five of them thought we could solve them. If children can’t imagine solving problems, “what will motivate them to try to make a difference?” Then, with their eyes closed, she helped them imagine a day in the future where all the problems had been solved, and questioned, “What role did you play in helping to bring about this better world?” Afterwards, when she asked again if they thought we could solve the problems, forty hands went up. Zoe expanded this thinking to help people learn to be solutionaries. Solutionaries start by imagining that a better world is possible. Through a four-step process, they “learn how to identify unjust, unsustainable, and inhumane systems and transform them so that they do the most good and least harm to people, animals, and the ecosystems that sustain life.” { read more }

Be The Change

Imagine a future where a problem in your community has been solved. Imagine the scene in detail. Now imagine what role you played in realizing the solution. Take a single first step. Be a solutionary!

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June 26, 2024

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Four Steps to Help People Feel Listened To

Your child announces he’s in love and dropping out of college to travel with his beloved across the globe. Your uncle makes a politically charged comment over a holiday meal. A doctor brushes off your concern, reiterating a line of reasoning you’ve already discussed. It can be a bewildering, enraging, or disempowering experience when something so clearly true from our perspective is so adamantly at odds with another’s point of reference. “At home, at work and in civic spaces, it’s not uncommon to have conversations that make you question the intelligence and benevolence of your fellow human beings,” writes Professor Julia Minson, Ph.D., who has spent years studying ways that parties in conflict can behave to make others feel they are thoughtfully engaging with their perspective. Drawing from computational linguistics to analyze thousands of disagreements, Minson and her team identified ways in which people engage each other with conversational receptiveness. Drawing from those techniques, they outlined a method and training called “HEAR” — Hedge your claims. Emphasize agreement. Acknowledge the opposing perspective. Reframe the positive. { read more }

Be The Change

Approach each conversation today with an intention to truly listen to others. Notice if your openness allows space for deeper topics to surface in the conversation that would otherwise remain dormant. If you’re inspired, practice the H.E.A.R. conversation style outlined by the article.

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June 25, 2024

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Painting in the Dharma

In 1969, Rosalyn White moved from Washington D.C. to attend the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California. “I was like a kid in a candy store!” she says. The hippie revolution was still in bloom and she discovered a place in Berkeley, Calif. called the Nyingma Meditation Center. That’s where she met Tarthang Tulku. Little did she know how her art journey was to change. For over forty years, Rosalyn White has followed a road less taken, especially in the Western art world. Instead of the dream of exhibits in the best galleries, sales and praise, White has a deeper and more lasting goal, the entry into what, in Buddhism, is sometimes called “Pure Land.” A life transformed in ways beyond words. { read more }

Be The Change

Approach you daily work with intentionality, recognizing it as an opportunity to search for your inner, spiritual world. Whether you paint, write or work with a craft, can you let it be a search for inner peace and external connection?

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