All posts tagged: Gelong Loden Nyima

Mindfulness and Permission to Feel

Published by DMCBlog

By Loden Nyima As human beings we’re always feeling. It’s what it means to be alive. It connects us with ourselves, each other, and our environment. Feelings, perceptions, intuitions, all contain wisdom. Yet these days, we often have to reclaim our ability to truly, actually feel. To allow ourselves to feel. To let our systems catch up from bombardment, overwhelm, or oppressive conditionings. In meditation, we call allowing ourselves to fully connect to our present experience “mindfulness” Mindfulness is a technical term in meditation that means to become familiar with something, to remember it, and to eventually remain undistracted from it. Our bodies, feelings, minds, and the whole world around us are all included within and are foundations for our mindfulness. They’re all regarded as quite sacred. Everything is welcomed, allowed, and connected with exactly as it is. We’re enough, and we can meet life as it is and go from there. Yet this is something we may have to reclaim through meditation practice, as this natural capacity has often been crushed, overwhelmed, or manipulated …

How to Meditate

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by: Loden Nyima, Resident Teacher at DMC Meditation is a process of trusting ourselves and coming home. We often come to meditation for relief from stress, turmoil, or from inspiration for meaning and truth. It’s that very part of ourselves seeking such things that already has them. It’s like longing for like. It’s our innate wisdom, compassion, and freedom shining through. We’re learning to trust that intuitive part of ourselves, to come home, and let it expand. Shamatha is a Sanskrit word that means “peaceful abiding”. It describes an ancient form of mediation that pre-dates Buddhism by a long shot and has been practiced by people of all or no spiritual or religious tradition for thousands of years. Many of the teachings we know today in the popular mindfulness movement were derived from these and related teachings, either in Buddhism, Yoga, or more. Anyone can practice shamatha, we don’t need to have any interest in Buddhism or in any spiritual tradition.. And if we do have an interest in Buddhism, shamatha is quite foundational to …

Becoming Our Own Best Friend

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by: Loden Nyima, Resident Teacher at DMC All of us long for connection. It’s just part of what we are. From a Buddhist point of view, it’s actually a form of our innate compassion, even if it’s all tangled up into loneliness or grasping at others to make us feel at ease. The irony is, we’re connected already…but more on that in a bit. We all want friends to talk to, people to share life with, to enjoy the ups and support the downs, people to understand us, to love us, etc. To a greater or lesser extent, we want to offer that to others, in one big cycle. And that’s a wonderful thing! And, we’re actually the only ones who can give that to ourselves completely. The more we offer unconditional love to ourselves, the more loving and healthy our relationships with others will be. The more we have to give, the more our innate compassion unfolds and embraces others. The more that happens, the more we feel how much of that also comes …

Our Self-Healing, Self-Rejuvenating Mind

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by: Loden Nyima, Resident Teacher at DMC Many of us these days come to meditation or a spiritual path with a wish to heal. To heal from one or another form of suffering or turmoil that we’ve experienced, or from the pace, demands, and challenges of modern life. We often come seeking relief, peace, stillness, rejuvenation, wellness, and even freedom from whatever limiting conditions we experience. The good news is that those qualities are already present in us already and are the parts of us doing the seeking and the asking. While we certainly don’t need to be a Buddhist or even interested in Buddhism to practice many forms of meditation (and I actually mean that!), one name for this part of ourselves is our Buddha nature. It’s our innate wisdom, compassion, freedom, health, and strength. The way it shines through in our lives can be by recognizing that we’re suffering and that we long to heal, to release, to be free.* It’s like longing for like. It’s the sun shining through the clouds, present …

Speaking of Silence

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by: Loden Nyima, Resident Teacher at DMC Healing in Space and Stillness When I lead silent meditation retreats, I often begin with a somewhat cynical joke. I ask, “OK, let’s have a show of hands, how many people here feel like we can keep up with everything in our lives, process all the information we receive in a day completely, give as much time and care to all of our interactions and relationships as they need, thoughtfully attend to all of our work and tasks with no rush whatsoever, take as much time as we need for self-care and health, relax at the end of the day with not a care in our minds, sleep as much as we need, then wake up the next day refreshed and ready to go?”…at this point usually we’re all chuckling and shaking our heads in empathetic commiseration and the kind of relief that comes from being able to laugh in authentic connection with others. That said, it’s no joke. From a meditative point of view, our spiritual energy …

Daily Practice: Our Reservoir of Sanity

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by: Loden Nyima, Resident Teacher at DMC Meditation practice is a lot like physical exercise: the consistency is more important than the amount. Having a daily meditation practice can be key to seeing real benefits in our lives. Every time we practice, it’s as if we’re deepening our reservoir of sanity, peace, resiliency, from which we can draw at any moment when we need it. The right amount of daily practice is the amount that feels attainable to us—even on, or especially on, a busy day. If we pick an amount that we know we can do, we’ll do it, and we’ll feel good about it, and that will help us build momentum and want to keep practicing, or even extend our practice. However, if we pick an amount that’s too much, we might get to it once in a while and just feel bad the rest of the time…that doesn’t help. So, err on the easy side. Ten minutes a day can actually be quite good. It sounds small, but try it out and …

Three Breaths at a Time: On the Spot Practices for Life

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by: Loden Nyima, Resident Teacher at DMC Now that we’ve established a daily meditation practice (or even if we haven’t), we’ve built a reservoir on which we can draw at any moment when we feel like we need it. One practice I like a lot during the day when I start to get stressed out or upset about something is the practice of three breaths. We can just close our eyes, and take three meditative breaths, then go from there. On the spot meditation. Or, if there’s stronger emotional energy, we can use the same method we talked about earlier (in “Our Self-Healing, Self-Rejuvenating Mind”) where instead of going with our narratives we find the raw feeling in our bodies with curiosity and care, and just breathe with it as if we’re massaging a knot in a muscle, in this case, with our breath. Another practice we can use is to connect with the elements. We can step outside the office for a second, or even look out a window, and gaze into the sky. …

How Will We Meet this Moment?

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By Gelong Loden Nyima // Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche passed away into parinirvana when I was nine months old. I never met him but have felt my path—like that of thousands—has been occurring in the wake of his. I practiced at places he founded, was taught and trained to teach in his lineage, and now live at Shambhala Mountain Center in a cabin on the aptly named “Stupa View” which sits in the valley beneath his Great Stupa of Dharmakaya. The Buddhist tradition identifies the age we’re living in as broadly fortunate because teachings leading to enlightenment are alive and available, yet also troubled as it is a time when the mass amalgamations of actions arising from greed, aggression, and willful ignorance ripen into social and global occurrences of resource depletion, conflict, and pandemic illness. Much of what we now know to be occurring, and what experts on climate change and public health expect for the future, has also been forecast in Buddhism for millennia based on this understanding of cause and effect. Similar to and …