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At the different stages of recognition, reflection, and redress, practicing compassion provides potentially world-saving opportunities which otherwise likely would not exist.
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Aberjhani (Illuminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.)
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Tom Paine has almost no influence on present-day thinking in the United States because he is unknown to the average citizen. Perhaps I might say right here that this is a national loss and a deplorable lack of understanding concerning the man who first proposed and first wrote those impressive words, 'the United States of America.'
But it is hardly strange.
Paine's teachings have been debarred from schools everywhere and his views of life misrepresented until his memory is hidden in shadows, or he is looked upon as of unsound mind.
We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic. He was the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible. Where Washington performed Paine devised and wrote. The deeds of one in the Weld were matched by the deeds of the other with his pen.
Washington himself appreciated Paine at his true worth. Franklin knew him for a great patriot and clear thinker. He was a friend and confidant of Jefferson, and the two must often have debated the academic and practical phases of liberty.
I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles. Although the present generation knows little of Paine's writings, and although he has almost no influence upon contemporary thought, Americans of the future will justly appraise his work. I am certain of it.
Truth is governed by natural laws and cannot be denied. Paine spoke truth with a peculiarly clear and forceful ring. Therefore time must balance the scales. The Declaration and the Constitution expressed in form Paine's theory of political rights. He worked in Philadelphia at the time that the first document was written, and occupied a position of intimate contact with the nation's leaders when they framed the Constitution.
Certainly we may believe that Washington had a considerable voice in the Constitution. We know that Jefferson had much to do with the document. Franklin also had a hand and probably was responsible in even larger measure for the Declaration. But all of these men had communed with Paine. Their views were intimately understood and closely correlated. There is no doubt whatever that the two great documents of American liberty reflect the philosophy of Paine.
...Then Paine wrote 'Common Sense,' an anonymous tract which immediately stirred the fires of liberty. It flashed from hand to hand throughout the Colonies. One copy reached the New York Assembly, in session at Albany, and a night meeting was voted to answer this unknown writer with his clarion call to liberty. The Assembly met, but could find no suitable answer. Tom Paine had inscribed a document which never has been answered adversely, and never can be, so long as man esteems his priceless possession.
In 'Common Sense' Paine flared forth with a document so powerful that the Revolution became inevitable. Washington recognized the difference, and in his calm way said that matters never could be the same again. It must be remembered that 'Common Sense' preceded the declaration and affirmed the very principles that went into the national doctrine of liberty. But that affirmation was made with more vigor, more of the fire of the patriot and was exactly suited to the hour... Certainly [the Revolution] could not be forestalled, once he had spoken.
{The Philosophy of Paine, June 7, 1925}
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Thomas A. Edison (Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison)
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Buddhism is a religion of the heart. Only this. One who practices to develop the heart is one who practices Buddhism [...] Use your heart to listen to the Teachings, not your ears.
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Ajahn Chah (Reflections)
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We are each living in our own soap opera. We do not see things as they really are. We see only our interpretations. This is because our minds are always so busy...But when the mind calms down, it becomes clear. This mental clarity enables us to see things as they really are, instead of projecting our commentary on everything.
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Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo (Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Teachings on Practical Buddhism)
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If learning is not followed by reflecting and practicing, it is not true learning.
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Thich Nhat Hanh (The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation)
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Education as the practice of freedom affirms healthy selfesteem in students as it promotes their capacity to be aware and live consciously. It teaches them to reflect and act in ways that further self-actualization, rather than conformity to the status quo.
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bell hooks (Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope)
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The universe is our greatest teacher, our greatest friend. It is always teaching us the Art of Peace. Study how water flows in a valley stream, smoothly and freely between the rocks. Everything—mountains, rivers, plants, and trees—should be your teacher. The world’s wisdom is contained in books, and by studying the words of the wise, countless new techniques can be created. Study and practice, and then reflect on your progress. The Art of Peace is the art of learning deeply, the art of knowing oneself.
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Morihei Ueshiba (The Art of Peace)
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The old adage we usually hear is that “practice makes perfect.” Based on what we know about neuroplasticity and deliberate practice, we should rephrase that to read, “practice makes permanent.” As you organize yourself for this self-reflective prep work, remember that it is not about being perfect but about creating new neural pathways that shift your default cultural programming as you grow in awareness and skill.
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Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
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It takes courage to accept life fully, to say yes to our life, yes to our karma, yes to our mind, emotions and whatever else unfolds. This is the beginning of courage. Courage is the fundamental openness to face even the hardest truths. It makes room for all the pain, joy, irony, and mystery that life provides.
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Dzigar Kongtrül III (It's Up to You: The Practice of Self-Reflection on the Buddhist Path)
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The essence of meditation is to induce a mind which is totally relaxed and at the same time totally aware. If you get into a lovely, dreamy, peaceful state where you don't want to move and you feel you could just sit for hours, completely blissed out and peaceful, but in a vague fog, you have gone completely astray.
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Ani Tenzin Palmo (Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Teachings on Practical Buddhism)
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In theological terms, the perseverance of the saints teaches in part that we bear the responsibility of obedience without expectation of certain outcomes.
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Mark D. Eckel (I Just Need Time to Think!: Reflective Study as Christian Practice)
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The mass education in high schools reflects the mass production of the real world. The teaching style has one teacher (supervisor) lecturing (leading) 20-25 students (workers) sitting in rows, much like a manager and his employees.
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Jacob Lund Fisker (Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence)
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When you reflect on the infinite number of happenstances that coalesced to produce you, then you understand how unique, how precious, how sacred you really are. Your task is to cultivate that precious, sacred nature and help it to flower.
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Robert Aitken (Encouraging Words: Zen Buddhist Teachings for Western Students)
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If you take the negative as absolute and definitive, however, you increase your worries and anxiety, whereas by broadening the way you look at a problem, you understand what is bad about it, but you accept it. This attitude comes to me, I think, from my practice and from Buddhist philosophy, which help me enormously.
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Dalai Lama XIV (My Spiritual Journey: Personal Reflections, Teachings, and Talks)
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Another essential testament to the authenticity of Rinpoche’s teachings is his unflinching devotion to his teachers and the strong emphasis he puts on nurturing bodhichitta, the vital altruistic attitude that leads one to realize, as the masters of the past stated, that “anything that is not meant to benefit others is simply not worth undertaking.
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Dzigar Kongtrül III (It's Up to You: The Practice of Self-Reflection on the Buddhist Path)
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The sutras liken reincarnation to the relationship between teachers and students. A singing teacher teaches students how to sing. His students learn techniques and benefit from direct experiential advice from their teacher. But the teacher doesn't remove a song from his throat and insert it into a student's mouth. Similarly, reincarnation is a continuity of everything we have learnt, like lighting one candle from another, or a face and its reflection in a mirror.
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Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse (Not For Happiness: A Guide to the So-Called Preliminary Practices)
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Having this inner space enables us to view our thoughts and emotions at a distance, which means we do not immediately identify with them as they arise. Normally we identify so strongly with our thoughts and emotions. Because we identify with them, we make them opaque, heavy, solid, real...we create space and a sense of detachment that helps us recognize who we are and what our true nature is. This makes our everyday life much more pleasant because we have a quiet, calm center in which to take refuge.
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Ani Tenzin Palmo (Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Teachings on Practical Buddhism)
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We know that Nietzsche was publicly envious of Stendahl's epigram:
"The only excuse for God is that he does not exist." Deprived of the divine will, the world is equally
deprived of unity and finality. That is why it is impossible to pass judgment on the world. Any attempt to
apply a standard of values to the world leads finally to a slander on life. Judgments are based on what is,
with reference to what should be—the kingdom of heaven, eternal concepts, or moral imperatives. But
what should be does not exist; and this world cannot be judged in the name of nothing. "The advantages
of our times: nothing is true, everything is permitted." These magnificent or ironic formulas which are
echoed by thousands of others, at least suffice to demonstrate that Nietzsche accepts the entire burden of
nihilism and rebellion. In his somewhat puerile reflections on "training and selection" he even formulated
the extreme logic of nihilistic reasoning: "Problem: by what means could we obtain a strict form of
complete and contagious nihilism which would teach and practice, with complete scientific awareness,
voluntary death?
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Albert Camus (The Rebel)
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If we don't use our daily life as a practice, nothing is ever going to change. It's not enough to just go to Dharma centers, or even to just do a daily practice. It's not even a matter of how much intellectual knowledge we absorb or how cleverly we understand concepts and ideas. The question is whether something inside is really changing. Is our mind being illuminated by these practices? Is our heart really opening? Are we kinder people? Are we more considerate? Are we feeling real compassion from the heart? If the answer to these questions is "No", we are merely indulging in intellectual play.
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Ani Tenzin Palmo (Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Teachings on Practical Buddhism)
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perceptions, our ways of thinking, and our behavior. It is a question of bringing about a complete reversal of mental habits by reducing emotions in a gradual process of study, reflection, and meditation—in other words, familiarization. That is how we refine the mind and purify it through a training that actualizes its potential. We learn to master the stream of our consciousness, to control the emotional obscurations, without letting ourselves be dominated by them. That is the path toward realization of the absolute nature. Our practice integrates all the aspects and all the various levels of the Buddha’s teaching.
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Dalai Lama XIV (My Spiritual Journey: Personal Reflections, Teachings, and Talks)
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So if we are feeling angry at someone, we sit and generate thoughts of loving-kindness towards him. We start by generating thoughts of loving-kindness towards ourselves. Then when that warmth, that sense of acceptance even of the anger, arises in the heart, you can give it out to others. Another way, depending on what kind of meditation we are doing, is to look at the anger itself. First you quiet the mind. Then you look at the anger to see what it feels like. Where is it? What is the physical reaction to it? What is anger? When we say "1 am angry," what does it mean? How does it feel? That's one way. Another way is to replay what made us angry and observe it from a distance, the way we would watch a movie. Then try to see whether we can replay that scenario in a different way.
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Ani Tenzin Palmo (Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Teachings on Practical Buddhism)
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In the Buddhist teachings on compassion there’s a practice called “one at the beginning, and one at the end.” When I wake up in the morning, I do this practice. I make an aspiration for the day. For example, I might say, “Today, may I acknowledge whenever I get hooked.” Or, “May I not speak or act out of anger.” I try not to make it too grandiose, as in, “Today, may I be completely free of all neurosis.” I begin with a clear intention, and then I go about the day with this in mind. In the evening, I review what happened. This is the part that can be so loaded for Western people. We have an unfortunate tendency to emphasize our failures. But when Dzigar Kongtrül teaches about this, he says that for him, when he sees that he has connected with his aspiration even once briefly during the whole day, he feels a sense of rejoicing. He also says that when he recognizes he lost it completely, he rejoices that he has the capacity to see that. This way of viewing ourselves has been very inspiring for me. He encourages us to ask what it is in us, after all, that sees that we lost it. Isn’t it our own wisdom, our own insight, our own natural intelligence? Can we just have the aspiration, then, to identify with the wisdom that acknowledges that we hurt someone’s feelings, or that we smoked when we said we wouldn’t? Can we have the aspiration to identify more and more with our ability to recognize what we’re doing instead of always identifying with our mistakes? This is the spirit of delighting in what we see rather than despairing in what we see. It’s the spirit of letting compassionate self-reflection build confidence rather than becoming a cause for depression. Being
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Pema Chödrön (Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears)
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The Levellers . . . only change and pervert the natural order of things: they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground. . . .
Far am I from denying in theory, full as far is my heart from withholding in practice (if I were of power to give or to withhold), the real rights of men. In denying their false claims of right, I do not mean to injure those which are real, and are such as their pretended rights would totally destroy. . . . In this partnership all men have equal rights; but not to equal things. . . .
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves, and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. . . .
Society is, indeed, a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure; but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. . . .
You would not cure the evil by resolving that there should be no more monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor of the Gospel— no interpreters of law, no general officers, no public councils. You might change the names: the things in some shape must remain. A certain quantum of power must always exist in the community, in some hands, and under some appellation. Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names— to the causes of evil, which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear. Otherwise you will be wise historically, a fool in practice. . . .
The effects of the incapacity shown by the popular leaders in all the great members of the commonwealth are to be covered with the 'all-atoning name' of Liberty. . . . But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths. . . . To make a government requires no great prudence. Settle the seat of power, teach obedience, and the work is done. To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government, that is to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind.
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Edmund Burke
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Each new human life retraces this ancient story. Young children are the very essence of human innocence. They run, play, and feel—and, as in Genesis, when they are naked they are not ashamed. Children provide a model for the assumption of healthy normality, and their innocence and vitality are part of why the assumption seems so obviously true. But that vision begins to fade as children acquire language and become more and more like the creatures adults see reflected every day in their mirrors. Adults unavoidably drag their children from the Garden with each word, conversation, or story they relate to them. We teach children to talk, think, compare, plan, and analyze. And as we do, their innocence falls away like petals from a flower, to be replaced by the thorns and stiff branches of fear, self-criticism, and pretense. We cannot prevent this gradual transformation, nor can we fully soften it. Our children must enter into the terrifying world of verbal knowledge. They must become like us.
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Steven C. Hayes (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change)
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translated by Richard B. Clarke Practice of Meditation by Zen Master Dogen TRUTH is perfect and complete in itself. It is not something newly discovered; it has always existed. Truth is not far away; it is ever present. It is not something to be attained since not one of your steps leads away from it. Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become clear and you will realize the unity of all things. The slightest movement of your dualistic thought will prevent you from entering the palace of meditation and wisdom. The Buddha meditated for six years, Bodhidharma for nine. The practice of meditation is not a method for the attainment of realization—it is enlightenment itself. Your search among books, word upon word, may lead you to the depths of knowledge, but it is not the way to receive the reflection of your true self. When you have thrown off your ideas as to mind and body, the original truth will fully appear. Zen is simply the expression of truth; therefore longing and striving are not the true attitudes of Zen. To actualize the blessedness of meditation you should practice with pure intention and firm determination. Your meditation room should be clean and quiet. Do not dwell in
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Jack Kornfield (Teachings of the Buddha)
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To understand how shame is influenced by culture, we need to think back to when we were children or young adults, and we first learned how important it is to be liked, to fit in, and to please others. The lessons were often taught by shame; sometimes overtly, other times covertly. Regardless of how they happened, we can all recall experiences of feeling rejected, diminished and ridiculed. Eventually, we learned to fear these feelings. We learned how to change our behaviors, thinking and feelings to avoid feeling shame. In the process, we changed who we were and, in many instances, who we are now. Our culture teaches us about shame—it dictates what is acceptable and what is not. We weren’t born craving perfect bodies. We weren’t born afraid to tell our stories. We weren’t born with a fear of getting too old to feel valuable. We weren’t born with a Pottery Barn catalog in one hand and heartbreaking debt in the other. Shame comes from outside of us—from the messages and expectations of our culture. What comes from the inside of us is a very human need to belong, to relate. We are wired for connection. It’s in our biology. As infants, our need for connection is about survival. As we grow older, connection means thriving—emotionally, physically, spiritually and intellectually. Connection is critical because we all have the basic need to feel accepted and to believe that we belong and are valued for who we are. Shame unravels our connection to others. In fact, I often refer to shame as the fear of disconnection—the fear of being perceived as flawed and unworthy of acceptance or belonging. Shame keeps us from telling our own stories and prevents us from listening to others tell their stories. We silence our voices and keep our secrets out of the fear of disconnection. When we hear others talk about their shame, we often blame them as a way to protect ourselves from feeling uncomfortable. Hearing someone talk about a shaming experience can sometimes be as painful as actually experiencing it for ourselves. Like courage, empathy and compassion are critical components of shame resilience. Practicing compassion allows us to hear shame. Empathy, the most powerful tool of compassion, is an emotional skill that allows us to respond to others in a meaningful, caring way. Empathy is the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes—to understand what someone is experiencing and to reflect back that understanding. When we share a difficult experience with someone, and that person responds in an open, deeply connected way—that’s empathy. Developing empathy can enrich the relationships we have with our partners, colleagues, family members and children. In Chapter 2, I’ll discuss the concept of empathy in great detail. You’ll learn how it works, how we can learn to be empathic and why the opposite of experiencing shame is experiencing empathy. The prerequisite for empathy is compassion. We can only respond empathically if we are willing to hear someone’s pain. We sometimes think of compassion as a saintlike virtue. It’s not. In fact, compassion is possible for anyone who can accept the struggles that make us human—our fears, imperfections, losses and shame. We can only respond compassionately to someone telling her story if we have embraced our own story—shame and all. Compassion is not a virtue—it is a commitment.
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Anonymous
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There appears to have been institutionalized bias against women right from the earliest times. I don’t think anybody sat down and thought, “Oh, let us be biased.” It’s just that it was part of the prevailing social scene. As the years passed, everything was recited and recorded from the male point of view. I am sure this was not intentional, it was just how it happened. Because most of the texts and the commentaries were written from the male point of view—that is, by monks—women increasingly began to be seen as dangerous and threatening. For example, when the Buddha talked about desire, he gave a meditation on the thirty-two parts of the body. You start with the hair on the top of the head and then go all the way down to the soles of the feet, imagining what you would find underneath if you took the skin off each part; the kidneys, the heart, the guts, the blood, the lymph and all that sort of thing. The practitioner dissects his body in order to cut through the enormous attachment to physical form and see it as it really is. Of course, in losing attachment to our own bodies, we also lose attachment to the bodies of others. But nonetheless, the meditation that the Buddha taught was primarily directed towards oneself. It was designed to cut off attachment to one’s own physical form and to achieve a measure of detachment from it; to break through any preoccupation the meditator might have about the attractiveness of his own body. However, when we look at what was being taught later, in the writings of Nagarjuna in the first century, or Shantideva in the seventh, we see that this same meditation is directed outwards, towards the bodies of women. It is the woman one sees as a bag of guts, lungs, kidneys, and blood. It is the woman who is impure and disgusting. There is no mention of the impurity of the monk who is meditating. This change occurred because this tradition of meditation was carried on by much less enlightened minds than that of the Buddha. So instead of just using the visualization as a meditation to break through attachment to the physical, it was used as a way of keeping the monks celibate. It was no longer simply a means of seeing things as they really are, but instead, as a means of cultivating aversion towards women. Instead of monks saying to themselves, “Women are impure and so am I and so are all the other monks around me,” it developed into “Women are impure.” As a consequence, women began to be viewed as a danger to monks, and this developed into a kind of monastic misogynism. Obviously, if women had written these texts, there would have been a very different perspective. But women did not write the texts. Even if they had been able to write some works from the female point of view, these still would have been imbued with the flavor and ideas of the texts and teachings designed for males. As a result of this pronounced bias, an imbalance developed in the teachings.
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Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo (Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Teachings on Practical Buddhism)
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Most exciting, the growth mindset can be taught to managers. Heslin and his colleagues conducted a brief workshop based on well-established psychological principles. (By the way, with a few changes, it could just as easily be used to promote a growth mindset in teachers or coaches.) The workshop starts off with a video and a scientific article about how the brain changes with learning. As with our “Brainology” workshop (described in chapter 8), it’s always compelling for people to understand how dynamic the brain is and how it changes with learning. The article goes on to talk about how change is possible throughout life and how people can develop their abilities at most tasks with coaching and practice. Although managers, of course, want to find the right person for a job, the exactly right person doesn’t always come along. However, training and experience can often draw out and develop the qualities required for successful performance. The workshop then takes managers through a series of exercises in which a) they consider why it’s important to understand that people can develop their abilities, b) they think of areas in which they once had low ability but now perform well, c) they write to a struggling protégé about how his or her abilities can be developed, and d) they recall times they have seen people learn to do things they never thought these people could do. In each case, they reflect upon why and how change takes place. After the workshop, there was a rapid change in how readily the participating managers detected improvement in employee performance, in how willing they were to coach a poor performer, and in the quantity and quality of their coaching suggestions. What’s more, these changes persisted over the six-week period in which they were followed up. What does this mean? First, it means that our best bet is not simply to hire the most talented managers we can find and turn them loose, but to look for managers who also embody a growth mindset: a zest for teaching and learning, an openness to giving and receiving feedback, and an ability to confront and surmount obstacles. It also means we need to train leaders, managers, and employees to believe in growth, in addition to training them in the specifics of effective communication and mentoring. Indeed, a growth mindset workshop might be a good first step in any major training program. Finally, it means creating a growth-mindset environment in which people can thrive. This involves: • Presenting skills as learnable • Conveying that the organization values learning and perseverance, not just ready-made genius or talent • Giving feedback in a way that promotes learning and future success • Presenting managers as resources for learning Without a belief in human development, many corporate training programs become exercises of limited value. With a belief in development, such programs give meaning to the term “human resources” and become a means of tapping enormous potential.
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Carol S. Dweck (Mindset: The New Psychology of Success)
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A third reason behind the preservation of doctrine is that Pentecostals have struggled to balance biblical teaching with their religious experience. Committed to the Reformation principle of biblical authority (“only Scripture”) as the standard for faith and practice, they have nonetheless experienced the temptation to elevate personal revelations and other spiritual manifestations to the same level. This struggle is reflected in an early Pentecostal Evangel report, describing the expectations of Frank M. Boyd as an early Bible school educator and instructor at Central Bible Institute (College after 1965): [H]e expected all the students to be more filled with fire and love and zeal and more filled with the Spirit when they left than when they came. He said that when men had the Word without the Spirit they were often dead and dull and dry; and when men had the Spirit without the Word there is always a tendency towards fanaticism. But where men had the Word and the Spirit, they would be equipped as the Master wants His ministers equipped.54 This challenge to instruct believers on how to have mature Spirit-filled life helps to explain the high priority given to publishing.
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Stanley M. Horton (Systematic Theology: Revised Edition)
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What would be a better tool to use in high school classroom than textbooks or timelines for creating an effective learning environment that could reflect the dynamic nature of historical study? Out of all the various alternatives, by far, film. Film is a hugely popular medium with endless number of historically based works that not only present facts but dramatize the human relationships behind those facts.
The main critique presented against the use of historical film in the classroom is the existence of rampant inaccuracies and biases laced throughout these films, not to mention the agendas of the filmmakers themselves. However these seeming flaws are part of the reason why film is an ideal teaching tool. It can foster deep critical thinking skills if instructors lead dialogues after film viewings about the inaccuracies, the biases and all of the things that make the film not just a record of a historical event, but also a reflection of the modern moment.
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Manhattan Prep (5 lb. Book of GRE Practice Problems)
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The ongoing success... reflects two fundamental shifts that have transformed my teaching, consulting, and advisory work since 'Serious Play'. The first is transitioning from the practice of selling solutions to the promise of providing an effective approach. The second is moving from the “transmission of expertise” toward the “cultivation of capability.
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Michael Schrage (The Innovator's Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More Than Good Ideas)
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In education, postmodernism rejects the notion that the purpose of education is primarily to train a child’s cognitive capacity for reason in order to produce an adult capable of functioning independently in the world. That view of education is replaced with the view that education is to take an essentially indeterminate being and give it a social identity.[24] Education’s method of molding is linguistic, and so the language to be used is that which will create a human being sensitive to its racial, sexual, and class identity. Our current social context, however, is characterized by oppression that benefits whites, males, and the rich at the expense of everyone else. That oppression in turn leads to an educational system that reflects only or primarily the interests of those in positions of power. To counteract that bias, educational practice must be recast totally. Postmodern education should emphasize works not in the canon; it should focus on the achievements of non-whites, females, and the poor; it should highlight the historical crimes of whites, males, and the rich; and it should teach students that science’s method has no better claim to yielding truth than any other method and, accordingly, that students should be equally receptive to alternative ways of knowing.[25]
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Stephen R.C. Hicks (Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition))
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IF WE ARE CONTENT just to think that compassion, rationality, and patience are good, that is not actually enough to develop these qualities. Difficulties provide the occasion to put them into practice. Who can make such occasions arise? Certainly not our friends, but rather our enemies, for they are the ones who pose the most problems. So that if we truly want to progress on the path, we must regard our enemies as our best teachers.
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Dalai Lama XIV (My Spiritual Journey: Personal Reflections, Teachings, and Talks)
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Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote to his son in 1943, "The one quality that can be developed by studious reflection and practice is the leadership of men .... The idea is to get people working together... because they instinctively want to do it for you.... Essentially, you must be devoted to duty, sincere, fair and cheerful." Devotion to duty. Sincerity. Fairness. Good cheer. These are not qualities taught in school. Formal education can make someone a good manager, but it cannot make a leader, because leadership is more about the heart than the head. How does any organization teach courage, integrity, a love of people, a sense of humor, the ability to dream of a better future? How can any training program inculcate personal character and honor?
Core to leadership is the ability to relate to people -- to empathize, understand, inspire and motivate.
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Robert M. Gates (A Passion for Leadership: Lessons on Change and Reform from Fifty Years of Public Service)
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All about Yoga Beauty Health.Yoga is a gathering of physical, mental, and otherworldly practices or teaches which started in antiquated India. There is a wide assortment of Yoga schools, practices, and objectives in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Among the most surely understood sorts of yoga are Hatha yoga and Rāja yoga. The birthplaces of yoga have been theorized to go back to pre-Vedic Indian conventions; it is said in the Rigveda however in all probability created around the 6th and fifth hundreds of years BCE,in antiquated India's parsimonious and śramaṇa developments. The order of most punctual writings depicting yoga-practices is indistinct, varyingly credited to Hindu Upanishads. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali date from the main portion of the first thousand years CE, however just picked up noticeable quality in the West in the twentieth century. Hatha yoga writings risen around the eleventh century with sources in tantra
Yoga masters from India later acquainted yoga with the west after the accomplishment of Swami Vivekananda in the late nineteenth and mid twentieth century. In the 1980s, yoga wound up noticeably well known as an arrangement of physical exercise over the Western world.Yoga in Indian conventions, be that as it may, is more than physical exercise; it has a reflective and otherworldly center. One of the six noteworthy standard schools of Hinduism is likewise called Yoga, which has its own epistemology and transcendentalism, and is firmly identified with Hindu Samkhya reasoning.
Beauty is a normal for a creature, thought, protest, individual or place that gives a perceptual ordeal of delight or fulfillment. Magnificence is examined as a major aspect of style, culture, social brain research, theory and human science. A "perfect delight" is an element which is respected, or has includes broadly ascribed to excellence in a specific culture, for flawlessness. Grotesqueness is thought to be the inverse of excellence. The experience of "magnificence" regularly includes a translation of some substance as being in adjust and amicability with nature, which may prompt sentiments of fascination and passionate prosperity. Since this can be a subjective ordeal, it is frequently said that "excellence is entirely subjective.
Health is the level of practical and metabolic proficiency of a living being. In people it is the capacity of people or groups to adjust and self-oversee when confronting physical, mental, mental and social changes with condition. The World Health Organization (WHO) characterized wellbeing in its more extensive sense in its 1948 constitution as "a condition of finish physical, mental, and social prosperity and not simply the nonappearance of sickness or ailment. This definition has been liable to contention, specifically as lacking operational esteem, the uncertainty in creating durable wellbeing procedures, and on account of the issue made by utilization of "finish". Different definitions have been proposed, among which a current definition that associates wellbeing and individual fulfillment. Order frameworks, for example, the WHO Family of International Classifications, including the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), are usually used to characterize and measure the parts of wellbeing.
yogabeautyhealth.com
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Ikram
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Paints a vivid picture of Jesus’ groundbreaking lessons . . . An impressively concise portrayal of Jesus as a moral philosopher [and] social reformer, just as one might study the teachings of the Buddha or the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. . . . Thorough and erudite . . . written in an almost conversationally informal style.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Thoughtful and well researched, Nordstrom’s book is a welcome perspective on Jesus. [Fountain of Change] documents Jesus’s progressive stances on politics, theology, and women’s rights [and] impart a great deal of practical wisdom allowing for [the] intrinsic meaning to be gleaned by any reader. . . . Nordstrom has a knack for language. Well-crafted, alluring prose . . . Short, concise chapters keep the text clipping along nicely.” —Foreword Reviews
“An extraordinary read from cover to cover and very highly recommended . . . Informed and informative, thoughtful and thought-provoking, inspired and inspiring . . . Will prove to be of immense interest for non-Christian readers . . . An enduringly popular addition to church, seminary, community, and academic library Christian History collections.” —Midwest Book Review
“Well-written, enjoyable, and informative . . . like a conversation with an intelligent friend . . . Here, we see Jesus not as a god, but as a man who preached love and acceptance. . . . Easy to understand exegesis, commentary, and reflections on Jesus’ public ministry.” —BlueInk
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Oscar R. Nordstrom
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Thus, in eastern Tibet, they say that before he died one monk asked that no one touch his corpse for a week and that the door to his room remain closed. After seven days, when they went into the room, his body had completely dissolved. They found only his monastic robes; even his nails and hair had disappeared. This monk was a hermit who lived very simply, without externalizing any signs of realization during his life devoted to contemplation. He had managed, through his practice, to actualize the primordial purity of the mind. We are not all called to such an accomplishment. It is better, for our daily practice, to stay at home, keeping our professional and family life while still learning to become better from day to day and adhering to a positive mode of life that will contribute to the good of society, according to the principles of the Dharma. We should choose professions in the areas of education, health, or social services. We should avoid renouncing everything for a solitary retreat. The aim is not to devote ourselves solely to spiritual practice, to lead a life lost in the glaciers. We should progress by degrees, steadily, taking care not to have extreme views, in a spirit of steadfastness and perseverance.
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Dalai Lama XIV (My Spiritual Journey: Personal Reflections, Teachings, and Talks)
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One of the best ways to do that is to cultivate the morning ritual of ignoring your phone until after you have found the gaze of God in Scripture. Going to Scripture before we go to our smartphones is another small way to pattern the morning in the reality of God’s love. But given the black-hole allure of the smartphone, it is probably one of the most radical habits of the household you can cling to. In turning our gaze to Scripture, we turn our gaze to the face of God, and find him looking back at us. In a house full of children, this will look as messy as everything else does. Ideally, the pattern of Scripture before smartphone means I’m up before them, having a few minutes to read and reflect before they wake. But of course that is not always the reality, and it is important to know that that is fine. Sometimes, that is even better, because one of the ways we teach the habits of the household is by letting children observe our habits and inviting them into them. Some mornings this looks like listening to a psalm while holding a kid who is holding a sippy cup of milk on my lap.8 He is invited into the routine. Occasionally it means reading a Bible story out loud to one of them. Many, many mornings it means they also get a book, or a coloring page, and we have some minutes of quiet before we start breakfast.
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Justin Whitmel Earley (Habits of the Household: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms)
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3) Chrislam is an Obvious False Teaching that Has Entered Christianity:
Marloes Janson and Birgit Meyer state that Chrislam merges Christianity and Islam. This syncretistic movement rests upon the belief that following Christianity or Islam alone will not guarantee salvation. Chrislamists participate in Christian and Islamic beliefs and practices. During a religious service Tela Tella, the founder of Ifeoluwa, Nigeria’s first Chrislamic movement, proclaimed that “Moses is Jesus and Jesus is Muhammad; peace be upon all of them – we love them all.’” Marloes Janson says he met with a church member who calls himself a Chrislamist. The man said, “You can’t be a Christian without being a Muslim, and you can’t be a Muslim without being a Christian.” These statements reflect the mindset of this community, which mixes Islam with Christianity, and African culture.
Samsindeen Saka, a self-proclaimed prophet, also promotes Chrislam. Mr. Saka founded the Oke Tude Temple in Nigeria in 1989. The church's name means the mountain of loosening bondage. His approach adds a charismatic flavor to Chrislam. He says those bound by Satan; are set free through fasting and prayer. Saka says when these followers are set free from evil spirits. Then, the Holy Spirit possesses them. Afterward, they experience miracles of healing and prosperity in all areas of their life. He also claims that combining Christianity and Islam relieves political tension between these groups. This pastor seeks to take dominion of the world in the name of Chrislam (1).
Today, Chrislam has spread globally, but with much resistance from the Orthodox (Christians, Muslims, and Jews). Richard Mather of Israeli International News says Chrislamists recognize both the Judeo-Christian “Bible and the Quran as holy texts.” So, they fuse these religions by removing Jewish references from the Bible. Thereby neutralizing the prognostic relevance “of the Jewish people and the land of Israel.” This fusion of Islam with Christianity is a rebranded form of replacement theology (2) (3). Also, traditional Muslims do not believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Therefore, they do not believe Christ died on the cross for the sins of the world. Thus, these religions cannot merge without destroying the foundations of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
References:
1. Janson, Marloes, and Birgit Meyer. “Introduction: Towards a Framework for the Study of Christian-Muslim Encounters in Africa.” Africa, Vol. 86, no. 4, 2016, pp. 615-619,
2. Mather, Richard. “What is Chrislam?” Arutz Sheva – Israel International News. Jewish Media Agency, 02 March 2015,
3. Janson, Marloes. Crossing Religious Boundaries: Islam, Christianity, and ‘Yoruba Religion' in Lagos, Nigeria, (The International African Library Book 64). Cambridge University Press. 2021.
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Marloes Janson (Crossing Religious Boundaries: Islam, Christianity, and ‘Yoruba Religion' in Lagos, Nigeria (The International African Library))
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To defend and teach the Bible from the very first verse – the great need for practical and relevant apologetics teaching for all ages To live an authentic, biblically based Christian life as individuals and as a church, so people will see Christ reflected in all that's done. Stop the hypocrisy!
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Ken Ham (Already Gone)
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Jnana Yoga is the path of knowledge, which requires one to question and reflect on the teachings given. SIGNIFICANCE Jnana Yoga is the path that purifies and strengthens the intellect through the process of unlearning.
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Rina Jakubowicz (The Yoga Mind: 52 Essential Principles of Yoga Philosophy to Deepen Your Practice)
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This involved doing two things, changing the classroom environment in order to reduce the extraneous cognitive load placed on my students and making some changes to teaching practice in order to reduce the intrinsic cognitive load of the work I was asking my students to complete.
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Derrick Roberts (Becoming a better teacher: Changing my practice and my classroom to reflect Cognitive Load Theory)
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As we learn, whether by reading, listening, or discussing, we need to be open so we can see ways to put what we learn into practice. If learning is not followed by reflecting and practicing, it is not true learning.
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Thich Nhat Hanh (The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation)
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The happiness that is derived from some secondary source is never very deep. It is only a pale reflection of the joy of Being, the vibrant peace that you find within as you enter the state of nonresistance. Being takes you beyond the polar opposites of the mind and frees you from dependency on form. Even if everything were to collapse and crumble all around you, you would still feel a deep inner core of
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Eckhart Tolle (Practicing the Power of Now: Essential Teachings, Meditations, and Exercises from the Power of Now)
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There is no obligation for the faithful of the Church or citizens of a state to obey anything that is not consonant with the traditions handed down by the will of God. Subjects need not justify disobeying novelties, rather it is the innovators who must demonstrate that they are not introducing contradictions to tradition, either secular or ecclesial. It is not necessary for something to be innovation to be foreign to tradition and alien to the revealed Word and will of God. One would have an extraordinarily difficult time explaining how anything describable as an "innovation", "novelty", or "change" can be consonant with immemorial, unchanging, divine Truth.
Obedience binds only to tradition in scripture, doctrine, and practice. If the faithful are presented with teachings, examples, or documents that do not reflect fidelity to God through the unchanging patrimony of the Church then they are free to ignore the innovations. This holds whether the context of the innovations is in man's secular relations or within the workings of Holy Mother Church. Those who are so gifted may be obligated to present questions for clarification to those in authority. Any who are confused should not suffer any qualms about doing what the Church has always done, in all places, by all the faithful, of all times. What has always saved, will always save. Doubts arise only when deviations are offered in the place of definitions. When the shifting sands of time encroach, the faithful are always safe in planting their feet firmly on the solid rock of the timeless Faith. (page 398)
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Fr. Lawrence Smith (Distributism for Dorothy)
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How we can appropriately enjoy good food, fine clothes and cheerful company as these come our way in the natural course of things. You should not worry yourself about food or clothing, feeling that these things are too good for you, but train your mind and the ground of your being to be above them. Nothing should rouse your mind to love and delight but God alone. It should be above all other things. Why? It would be a sickly form of inwardness which needed to be put right by external clothing; rather, as long as it is under your control, what is inside should correct what is outside. And if the latter comes to you in a different form, then you should accept it as being good from the ground of your being, but in such a way that you would accept it just as willingly if it were different again. It is just the same with the food, the friends and relatives and with everything that God may give you or take from you. And so in my view the most important thing of all is that we should give ourselves up entirely to God whenever he allows anything to befall us, whether insult, tribulation or any other kind of suffering, accepting it with joy and gratitude and allowing God to guide us all the more rather than seeking these things out ourselves. Willingly learn all things from God therefore and follow him, and all will be well with you. Then we will be able to accept honour and comfort, and if dishonour and discomfort were to be our lot, we could and would be just as willing to endure these too. So they can justifiably feast who would just as willingly fast.15 And that must also be the reason why God relieves his friends of both major and minor suffering, which otherwise his infinite faithfulness could not allow him to do, for there is so much and such great benefit in suffering and he neither wishes nor ought to deny his own anything which is good. But he is content with a good and upright will, or else he would spare them no suffering on account of the inexpressible benefit which it contains. As long as God is content, you too should be content, and when it is something else in you which pleases him, then you should still be content. For we should be so totally God’s possession inwardly with the whole of our will that we should not be unduly concerned about either devotional practices or works. And in particular you should avoid all particularity, whether in the form of clothes, food or words – as in making grand speeches, or particularity of gesture, since these things serve no useful purpose at all. But you should also know that not every form of particularity is forbidden to you. There is much that is particular which we must sometimes do and with many people, for whoever is a particular person must also express particularity on many occasions and in many ways. We should have grown into our Lord Jesus Christ inwardly and in all things so that all his works are reflected in us together with his divine image. We should bear in ourselves all his works in a perfect likeness as far as we can. Though we are the agents of our actions, it is he who should take form in them. So act out of the whole of your devotion and your intent, training your mind in this at all times and teaching yourself to grow into him in all that you do.
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Meister Eckhart (Selected Writings)
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Identifying with the results is very dangerous, especially for those trying to control the senses or practice celibacy.
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B.T. Swami (Reflections on Sacred Teachings V: Srila Bhaktisiddhanta's Sixty-four Principles for Community)
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EXPERIMENT That our beliefs about the capability of others have a direct impact on their performance has been adequately demonstrated in a number of experiments from the field of education. In these tests teachers are told, wrongly, that a group of average pupils are either scholarship candidates or have learning difficulties. They teach a set curriculum to the group for a period of time. Subsequent academic tests show that the pupils’ results invariably reflect the false beliefs of their teachers about their ability. It is equally true that the performance of employees will reflect the beliefs of their managers. For example, Fred sees himself as having limited potential. He feels safe only when he operates well within his prescribed limit. This is like his shell. His manager will only trust him with tasks within that shell. The manager will give him task A, because he trusts Fred to do it and Fred is able to do it. The manager will not give him task B, because he sees this as beyond Fred’s capability. He sees only Fred’s performance, not his potential. If he gives the task to the more experienced Jane instead, which is expedient and understandable, the manager reinforces or validates Fred’s shell and increases its strength and thickness. He needs to do the opposite, to help Fred venture outside his shell, to support or coach him to success with task B. To use coaching successfully we have to adopt a far more optimistic view than usual of the dormant capability of all people. Pretending we are optimistic is insufficient because our genuine beliefs are conveyed in many subtle ways of which we are not aware.
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John Whitmore (Coaching for Performance Fifth Edition: The Principles and Practice of Coaching and Leadership UPDATED 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION)
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...Here we are concerned with the teaching of not just any subject, but with the direct object of the sentence: composition, about putting words together to create meanings, in the sense that a music composer puts notes together to create new music. Our problem becomes how we can provide the circumstances that promote such learning. Promote is the key word. The evidence is that learning to write in the sense of compose does not take place in the absence of appropriate environments to promote such learning.
"To create those environments, if they are to be available to all students, regardless of home environments, we need a set of theories that allow us to integrate not only the varieties of knowledge that writers need, but a theory of teaching writing that demands a combination of optimism and constant skepticism about what we do as teachers. Our integration of theories must allow us to act but, at the same time, insure our constant evaluation of each action, whether tried and true or new.
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George Hillocks (Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice (Language and Literacy Series))
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Active critical reflection is necessary in every aspect of our teaching, not only in front of a class. We must try to reevaluate our own values and experiences as they relate to our teaching. Our assumptions and theories about teaching composition must remain open to inspection, evaluation, and revision, a condition that requires an active inquiry paralleling the inquiry in which we engage our students.
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George Hillocks (Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice (Language and Literacy Series))
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...[T]he teaching of writing is fraught with difficulties. Teaching well, in my experience and that of my students, can be very time-consuming, demanding, frustrating, and, given institutional constraints, sometimes infuriating. It demands the recognition that, in Burns's words, 'The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft aglay.' At the same time, composition lies at the heart of education. When students make gains as writers, the gains are likely to affect other educational endeavors. And for teachers, the joy of seeing students create some new part of themselves, and do it well, washes the difficulties to insignificance and provides the impetus to try, like the Bruce's unrelenting spider, again, and again, and again.
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George Hillocks (Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice (Language and Literacy Series))
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...[T]he inherent polysemous character of language and the necessity of interpreting language according to one's personal understandings eliminate the possibility of infusing one's sentiments directly into the mind of another. At the same time, these characteristics of language and its interpretations suggest that no text ought ever to be thought complete. We can never manage to complete our ideas, to work out their full implications, to recognize their inadequacies, or to say what 'we really meant.' Further, since anything we say can be challenged, as Graff (1992b) points out, we can never manage to meet all the possible challenges. Such an idea may seem to be an unbearable problem. But we have always lived with these conditions. We have simply ignored them.
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George Hillocks (Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice (Language and Literacy Series))
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The possibility of knowledge is relevant to Dallas’s account of the spiritual life. The point of his books The Spirit of the Disciplines, The Divine Conspiracy and Renovation of the Heart is that we must adopt specific practices in order to deepen our apprehension of God’s activity in the world. If we fail to sharpen our perception of the great spiritual truths as revealed in the life of Christ, God’s kingdom, in all its life-transforming richness and power, will simply pass us by. Again, you see it happen every day.
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Dallas Willard (Eternal Living: Reflections on Dallas Willard's Teaching on Faith and Formation)
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Stiggins’s Seven Practices of Assessment FOR Learning Where am I going? Provide a clear and understandable vision of the learning target. Use examples and models of strong and weak work. Where am I now? Offer regular descriptive feedback. Teach students to self-assess and set goals. How can I close the gap? Design lessons to focus on one aspect of quality at a time. Teach students focused revision. Engage students in self-reflection, and let them keep track of and share their learning.
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Cris Tovani (So What Do They Really Know?: Assessment That Informs Teaching and Learning)
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Why do we call yoga a practice? The yoga poses of life—the grief, the fear,
the uncertainty—rarely offer us the option of coming to child pose or modifying the posture. The yoga mat offers us a safe and controlled environment in which we can witness our challenges, embrace our discomfort, and hold space for our struggles. A yoga practice doesn’t prevent the storms of life, but it does teach us to weather those storms more gracefully.
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Darren Main (The River of Wisdom: Reflections on Yoga, Meditation, and Mindful Living)
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He is talking to the person, not to the various masks they are wearing for the world.
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Ani Tenzin Palmo (Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Teachings on Practical Buddhism)
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That's why we are always stressed, because we are always looking at something in the distance. If you are always looking at the top of the mountain you are climbing, you cannot be aware of the grass and flowers growing at your feet.... If we lose this moment because we are thinking about something else, we've lost it forever.
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Ani Tenzin Palmo (Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Teachings on Practical Buddhism)
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In his teachings, Kongtrül Rinpoche demonstrates with uncompromising clarity how the identification with a solid self and the resulting feeling of self-importance offer an open target for the painful arrows of anger, obsession, pride, and jealousy.
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Dzigar Kongtrül III (It's Up to You: The Practice of Self-Reflection on the Buddhist Path)
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A Zen master was heartbroken when her son died. At the funeral she cried and cried. Her disciples were surprised. “Didn’t you teach us,” they asked, “that everything is illusion?” She glared at them and said, “If you don’t understand that each tear I shed saves countless sentient beings, you know nothing about Zen.” Are
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Ken I McLeod (Reflections on Silver River: Tokme Zongpo's Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva)
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Master Padma said: If you train your mind in love, compassion, and bodhicitta, you will not take rebirth in the three lower realms. Moreover, from this very moment you will never fall back. This alone is my oral instruction. Wherever you go, keep bodhicitta in mind, never departing from its company. Whatever action you engage in, train in doing it for the benefit of sentient beings. Train in regarding others as more important than yourself. You will attain numerous qualities as a result of this training, such as having unimpaired samayas and vows. Unless you cultivate bodhicitta, you will not attain enlightenment, even though you may gain mastery of mantra and be very powerful. All the supreme and common accomplishments will result from bodhicitta arising in your being. That alone is my oral instruction. Master Padma said: Whether you meditate on emptiness or anything else, it is mistaken meditation practice unless it becomes an effective remedy against disturbing emotions and ordinariness. Something that does not counteract the disturbing emotions and ordinariness is a cause for falling into samsaric existence. If any teaching you study, reflect upon, or expound becomes an effective remedy against your disturbing emotions as well as an aid for allowing the pure Dharma to take birth in your being, then that is called a Mahayana teaching and is unmistaken. No matter how much you may be acclaimed as learned in study, exposition, and meditation, if your intention is only the eight worldly concerns, your activity is called a black Dharma practice. In
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Padmasambhava (Dakini Teachings: A Collectin of Padmasambhava's Advice to the Dakini Yeshe Tsogyal)
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When you’re inspired, you become inspiring.”
“Before building walls, build a foundation, make sure it’s solid and that it remains solid.”
“Never limit your ambitions.”
“If you want to shine like a star, care to make others shine like stars.”
“Someone’s respect for the environment will likely reflect his truest respect for others.”
“Learn to recognize and celebrate your personal milestones. It will trigger positive emotions in you.”
“Make peace with your past. You’ll emotionally be more positive. You’ll improve your wisdom. You’re inner sweetness will breathe out more efficiently.”
“When you emotionally manage the fact that perfection does not exist and only reaching excellence does, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently.”
“We all have emotional batteries. We are all energy. Your positive energy can help someone else recharge.”
“Humans are responsible for nearly all problems and are the solution for everything - Be positively, the solution!”
“Be careful what you tolerate in your company, you are teaching levels of the pyramid how to treat your business Culture and Core Values.”
“Raising your voice is not an argument.”
“Feed positively your roots. As a result, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently thru your shell.”
“Authenticity in the workplace is not define as making yourself difficult to manage – Be positively authentic!”
“Be positively the influencer, not the follower.”
“Biases can trick us as humans and have a negative impact on our emotions – Be positively curious!”
“Never make someone emotionally pay the price because of how you were not able to manage positively your own emotions.”
“If you want your team to improve their technical skills, make sure to improve your interpersonal skills first.”
“Beware of the individualism culture. If you are in a people management/leadership position, remember the following:
IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU!”
“Like the roots of a human’s mind, feed social media positively. It will feed a large scale of humans mind!”
“Like an upside-down pineapple fruit, the inner sweetness of a company becomes sweeter when you flip upside down the position level pyramid!”
“Do not wait for someone to harvest you. Build your own path!”
“A leader should trigger positive emotions and it all starts with you!”
“Earth is more beautiful than we think – Imagine how splendid it would be if we were all interacting positively on it!”
Communication becomes efficient when it’s done we positive emotions – Be positively curious!”
“Having excuses for everything is the roadblock of self-awareness and inner growth”
“Don’t limit your challenges – rather – Challenge your limits!”
“The higher the position level you’re ambitious to reach, the less about you it should be. In life, you’re already at the top, therefore, it starts with you because it is not about you!”
“I’m realistically optimistic!”
“The pineapple - from all fruits – looks authentic. The great thing about it is no matter its shape – size - high – and color, one thing remains the same: Its inner sweetness! A pineapple = a pineapple. A pineapple = a human”
“Often, what we think we know - what we think is - and what we think should are our biggest obstacles in life. Be positively curious!”
“Being curious is best practice – Be positive curious, meaning, with positive emotions. Your inner sweetness will be felt with this approach”
“Keep it sweet with yourself, not everything is suited for everyone!”
“The art of managing with discipline emotional challenges and a sign of a mental strength is when many appreciate what you do in the shadow and in silence, and you still do more than expected.”
“Beware of the time is money mindset blind spots, respectful interactions and good social etiquettes are not to be served like an American fast food!”
“Look and listen without biases – Be positively curious!
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Steve "Mr. Pineapple" Mathieu
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When you’re inspired, you become inspiring.”
“Before building walls, build a foundation, make sure it’s solid and that it remains solid.”
“Never limit your ambitions.”
“If you want to shine like a star, care to make others shine like stars.”
“Someone’s respect for the environment will likely reflect his truest respect for others.”
“Learn to recognize and celebrate your personal milestones. It will trigger positive emotions in you.”
“Make peace with your past. You’ll emotionally be more positive. You’ll improve your wisdom. You’re inner sweetness will breathe out more efficiently.”
“When you emotionally manage the fact that perfection does not exist and only reaching excellence does, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently.”
“We all have emotional batteries. We are all energy. Your positive energy can help someone else recharge.”
“Humans are responsible for nearly all problems and are the solution for everything - Be positively, the solution!”
“Be careful what you tolerate in your company, you are teaching levels of the pyramid how to treat your business Culture and Core Values.”
“Raising your voice is not an argument.”
“Feed positively your roots. As a result, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently thru your shell.”
“Authenticity in the workplace is not define as making yourself difficult to manage – Be positively authentic!”
“Be positively the influencer, not the follower.”
“Biases can trick us as humans and have a negative impact on our emotions – Be positively curious!”
“Never make someone emotionally pay the price because of how you were not able to manage positively your own emotions.”
“If you want your team to improve their technical skills, make sure to improve your interpersonal skills first.”
“Beware of the individualism culture. If you are in a people management/leadership position, remember the following:
IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU!”
“Like the roots of a human’s mind, feed social media positively. It will feed a large scale of humans mind!”
“Like an upside-down pineapple fruit, the inner sweetness of a company becomes sweeter when you flip upside down the position level pyramid!”
“Do not wait for someone to harvest you. Build your own path!”
“A leader should trigger positive emotions and it all starts with you!”
“Earth is more beautiful than we think – Imagine how splendid it would be if we were all interacting positively on it!”
Communication becomes efficient when it’s done we positive emotions – Be positively curious!”
“Having excuses for everything is the roadblock of self-awareness and inner growth”
“Don’t limit your challenges – rather – Challenge your limits!”
“The higher the position level you’re ambitious to reach, the less about you it should be. In life, you’re already at the top, therefore, it starts with you because it is not about you!”
“I’m realistically optimistic!”
“The pineapple - from all fruits – looks authentic. The great thing about it is no matter its shape – size - high – and color, one thing remains the same: Its inner sweetness! A pineapple = a pineapple. A pineapple = a human”
“Often, what we think we know - what we think is - and what we think should are our biggest obstacles in life. Be positively curious!”
“Being curious is best practice – Be positive curious, meaning, with positive emotions. Your inner sweetness will be felt with this approach”
“Keep it sweet with yourself, not everything is suited for everyone!”
“The art of managing with discipline emotional challenges and a sign of a mental strength is when many appreciate what you do in the shadow and in silence, and you still do more than expected.”
“Beware of the time is money mindset blind spots, respectful interactions and good social etiquettes are not to be served like an American fast food!”
“Look and listen without biases – Be positively curious!
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Steve "Mr. Pineapple" Mathieu
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However, any true Visionary will ultimately teach you that the only true guru exists within you. Visionaries serve as a reflection of your own spiritual practice, reminding you that you already have the answers within yourself.
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Sahara Rose Ketabi (Discover Your Dharma: A Vedic Guide to Finding Your Purpose)
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These reflections inspire a strong sense of “renunciation,” an urgent desire to emerge from samsara and follow the path to liberation, which forms the foundation for the specific practices of taking refuge in the Buddha, the truth of his teaching, and the example of its practitioners, and so awakening a confidence and trust in our own inner buddha nature giving birth to compassion (Bodhichitta—the heart of the enlightened mind, which I shall explain in detail in Chapter 12) and training the mind to work with ourself and others and the difficulties of life removing obscurations and “defilements” through the visualization and mantra practice of purification and healing accumulating merit and wisdom by developing universal generosity and creating auspicious circumstances.1
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Sogyal Rinpoche (The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying)
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Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body’s reaction to your mind — or you might say a reflection of your mind in the body.
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Eckhart Tolle (Practicing the Power of Now: Essential Teachings, Meditations, and Exercises from the Power of Now)
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So what is the scientific consensus on the components of a high-quality program? According to experts such as Yale emeritus professor Edward Zigler (a leader in child development and early education policy for half a century), the best preschool programs share several common features: they provide ample opportunities for young children to use and hear complex, interactive language; their curriculum supports learning processes and a wide range of school-readiness goals that include social and emotional skills and active learning; and they have knowledgeable and well-qualified teachers who use what are known as reflective teaching practices. Effective programs also demonstrate careful, intentional programming that is driven by more than just scheduling whims or calendar holidays or what’s in the teacher guide this week, and they also take seriously the active involvement of family members.
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Erika Christakis (The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups)
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When I reflect on the olden days, and on how my work in psychology and philosophy has evolved over the last 30 years, I recognize that I took a path that was mostly self-directed and not very orthodox. I stepped away from academia. I gave up a secure teaching position. I followed my intuition, and I took the road less traveled. I blended psychology with spirituality. I studied mysticism and physics. I practiced yoga philosophy and wrote poetry. Along the way I became a teacher of inquiry, and
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Robert Holden (Higher Purpose: How to Find More Inspiration, Meaning, and Purpose in Your Life)
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The inescapable conclusion is that instrumentalism is not the result of a scholarly analysis but rests on a personal choice. It buys practical relevance and popularity at the expense of a thorough explication, examination, and justification of the foundations of its teachings. Like so many programs which are impatient with the exacting and hard issues of traditional epistemology, pragmatism under the guise of down-to-earth practicality and progress, promotes a thoughtless dogma. Dewey was not doing philosophy, he was writing a creed. But upon reflection this should not surprise us. At the beginning we noted that pragmatism set forth the view that truth is what which 'works.' At that point, we could have asked whether the pragmatic theory claims to be true in the older sense of a current description of what is the case. If it does not (and it could not, given Dewey's disdain for a spectator approach to truth), then what could pragmatism be? It could only be a recommendation. And as such (prescriptive, rather than descriptive), we are free to reject it.
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Greg L. Bahnsen
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Digital Marketing Course in Bangalore- Upskill Rocket
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Furthermore, as letters emerging from an ancient Greco-Roman context, the Epistles presume certain cultural norms, like patriarchy, slavery, and patronage, and reflect the unique concerns of a minority religious sect in an imperial context. They expect women to wear head coverings (1 Corinthians 11:6), men to have short hair (11:14), and everyone to “greet one another with a holy kiss” (16:20). They wrestle with the age-old question of how to live as citizens of the kingdom of God in the shadow of the empire, as well as specific questions about whether Christians should buy discounted meat after it has been sacrificed to Roman gods. As a result, many passages carry a timeless, universal quality—“God is love” (1 John 4:16), while others reflect the unique challenges confronting followers of Jesus in the first century—“Eat anything sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience” (1 Corinthians 10:25). As Pastor Adam Hamilton explained, “When you read one of Paul’s letters, or any other New Testament letter, you are reading someone else’s mail. Christians often forget this. They read Paul’s letters as though he wrote just for them. This works fine most of the time; Paul’s instructions, his theological reflections and his practical concerns are amazingly timeless. But they become most meaningful, and we are least likely to misapply their teaching, when we seek to understand why he may have written this or that to a given church.
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Rachel Held Evans (Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again)
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Yoga is the effort to experience one's divinity personally and then to hold on that experience forever. Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek instead a place of eternal presence form which may regard yourself and your surrounding with poise.
it's all god in disguise but they yogis believe a human life is a very special opportunity because only in alumni from and only with a special opportunity because only in a human form and only with a human mind can God realization ever occur.
is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.
a great yogi is anyone who has achieved the permanent state of enlightened bliss. A guru is a great yogi who can actually pass that state on to theirs.
mantravirya the potency of the Enlighted consciousness
capable of conscious inquiry
a yearning to understand the nature of the universe.
living spiritual master
when I was nine, I couldn't do a thing with it except cry later over these years my hypersensitive awareness of times s led me to push myself to experience life at a maximum pace if I were going to have such a short visit on earth, I had to do everything possible e to experience it now hence all the traveling all the romances all the ambition all the pasta.
On the other the Zen masters always say that you cannot see your reflection in running water only in still Ater so something was telling me it would be spiritually negligent to run off now then so much was happening right here in this small, cloistered place where every minute of the day is organized to facilitate self-exploration and devotional practice.
vipassana mediation teaches that grief and nuisance are inevitable in this life but if you can plant yourself in stillness long enough you will in time experience the truth that everything. (both uncomfortable and lovely) does eventually pass.
Man is neither entirely ap upper off the god and is not entirely the captain of his own destiny he is a little of both.
But when they do show up again i can just send them back here back to this rooftop of memory back to the care of those two cool blue souls who already and always understand everything
This is what rituals are for we do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place of our most complicated feeling of joy or trauma so that we don't have to have those feelings around with us forever weight us down.
we have hands we can stand on them if we want to that's our privilege that is the joy of a moral body and that is because God needs us because God loves to feel things through our hands.
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Elizabeth Gilbert
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Teaching academic writing to Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) students is crucial early in their academic journey and should continue throughout their program. Here's a breakdown:
Foundation Level (First Year): Introducing basic academic writing skills at the onset helps students develop a strong foundation. This includes understanding essay structure, proper citation methods (APA, MLA), and critical reading and writing skills NURS FPX 4010 Assessment 2.
Core Nursing Courses: As students progress into core nursing courses, integrating academic writing into these subjects is beneficial. Assignments related to evidence-based practice, research papers, case studies, and reflective writing can aid in linking theoretical knowledge to practical application through writing.NURS FPX 4010 Assessment 3
Clinical Practice Integration: Incorporating writing assignments that reflect on clinical experiences or patient interactions helps students articulate their observations, reflections, and professional development, enhancing their communication skills.online class help services
Advanced Nursing Courses: In advanced years, focus on more complex academic writing, such as scholarly articles, thesis or capstone projects, and literature reviews. This phase aligns with deeper research and specialization within nursing fields.
Continuous Improvement: Encourage ongoing improvement by providing resources, workshops, and feedback on writing. Additionally, revisiting and reinforcing academic writing skills periodically ensures students maintain and enhance these crucial abilities.nursfpx.com
By introducing and reinforcing academic writing skills across various stages of the BSN program, students develop proficiency in communicating their ideas effectively, a skill essential for their future practice, research endeavors, and professional growth.
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nimra
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I’ve come to call what I experienced the process of being known. This is a much deeper and richer experience than simply knowing the bare facts of my story. It reflects what neuroscience and related disciplines are teaching us about what it means to live an integrated life—both as an individual and as part of a community.
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Curt Thompson (Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships)
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Mahayana Buddhism was marked by the emergence of the bodhisattva ideal. It reinterpreted early Buddhist teachings, such as the Teaching of All Buddhas, in the light of the messianic vow to save all beings. Several hundred years later, these bodhisattva precepts were expressed by teachers of the Zen tradition as the Three Pure Precepts: Embrace and sustain forms and ceremonies
Embrace and sustain all good
Embrace and sustain all beings The Three Pure Precepts pay homage to the bodhisattva ideal of Mahayana Buddhism in the context of monastic life and practice, which reflects the origins of Zen.
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Reb Anderson (Being Upright: Zen Meditation and Bodhisattva Precepts (Zen Meditation and the Bodhisattva Precepts))
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Teaching students social and emotional skills and practicing those skills when students are relaxed and reflective means they will be able to use these skills when they need them.
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Sara E. Rimm-Kaufman (SEL from the Start: Building Skills in K-5 (Social and Emotional Learning Solutions))
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Teaching is a radical act of hope. It is an assertion of faith in a better future in an increasingly uncertain and fraught present. It is a commitment to that future even if we can’t clearly discern its shape. It is a continuing pedagogical practice rather than a set of static characteristics. Simply put, we teach because we believe it matters. That may be hard to remember when we’re driving dozens of miles from one adjunct gig to another, or when we’re buried beneath a pile of papers to grade, or when we get the dean’s email about further cuts to our department’s operating budget. Yet that’s when it’s most evident, if we really think about it. Our most quotidian practices— even and especially in environments of adversity— are a constant assertion that through our work with and among our students we are creating a better future. The very acts of trying to teach well, of adopting a critically reflective practice to improve our teaching and our students’ learning, are radical , in that word’s literal sense: they are endeavors aimed at fundamental, root-level transformation. And they are acts of hope because they imagine that process of transformation as one in which a better future takes shape out of our students’ critical refusal to abide the limitations of the present.
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Kevin M. Gannon (Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto)
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Professionals have been disturbed to find that they cannot account for processes they have come to see as central to professional competence. It is difficult for them to imagine how to describe and teach what might be meant by making sense of uncertainty, performing artistically, setting problems, and choosing among competing professional paradigms, when these processes seem mysterious in the light of the prevailing model of professional knowledge. We are bound to an epistemology of practice which leaves us at a loss to explain, or even to describe, the competences to which we now give overriding importance.
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Donald A. Schön (The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action)
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In the second turning, we “Encourage” ourselves to practice this path. This is realized by learning, reflecting, and practicing. As we learn, whether by reading, listening, or discussing, we need to be open so we can see ways to put what we learn into practice. If learning is not followed by reflecting and practicing, it is not true learning.
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Thich Nhat Hanh (The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation)
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For whoever holds love and compassion in high esteem, the practice of tolerance is essential, and it requires an enemy.
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Dalai Lama XIV (My Spiritual Journey: Personal Reflections, Teachings, and Talks)
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Bad Faith Experiences Trust is broken through a variety of bad faith experiences. They can be grouped into four general categories: -Insensitivity. Spiritual leaders, or people in a faith community, lack the emotional intelligence to treat you thoughtfully and with the basic kindness reflected by the love of God. -Toxic Faith. Spiritual leaders teach a theologically incorrect message, often involving a legalistic, performance-based belief system, which distorts one’s relationship with God and people. -Spiritual Abuse. Spiritual leaders use their authority to manipulate and control people for their personal gain and to the detriment of the believer. -Mind-Control. Spiritual leaders strip people of their identity and reshape them into their own image.
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F. Remy Diederich (Broken Trust: …a practical guide to identify and recover from toxic faith, toxic church, and spiritual abuse)
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The best growth is aided by community. Yes, we teachers should study our craft vigorously. We should take classes. We should attend conferences. But, in truth, without discussion practice, we will never see our fullest potential. Here, teaching is no different from other pursuits: Lasting improvement requires dedication to the humbling cycle of practice and reflection.
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Matthew R. Kay (Not Light, but Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom)
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Train Your Brain To Reflect Consciousness
Let anybody teach any religion, you can practice all that in the daytime, but if you want to fall asleep the only religion you have to follow is Hinduism, nothing else will teach you to fall asleep! Any amount of any sized bed you can buy, pills you can swallow, only Vedic tradition can give you rest; because falling asleep is an action, it is not collapsing on the bed as you have been taught from the beginning. Your buddhi (intellect) needs to be powerful. Your buddhi will be powerful whole day if you keep your body and intellect powerful. Whole day if you are acting, alive, not entertaining the boredom and tiredness, then just you can stretch your body, it will fall into Samadhi, it will fall into the state of Yoga Nidra.
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-KAILASA's SPH JGM Nithyananda Paramashivam
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I was greatly impressed by Geshe-la's qualities-his personal solidity, the sharpness of his mind, his obvious mastery of his tradition-which were manifest in the crystal-clear teachings he gave.' I was also impressed by his confidence in the validity of his tradition, displayed in a readiness to discuss any question. Students could raise many questions, and Geshe-la always had an answer, usually a very good one, which he proposed on its own merits, not relying on the authority of the tradition or himself. Moreover, students, like grown-ups, were given the freedom to think for themselves. When they encountered difficult topics, such as reincarnation and karma, Geshe-la would advocate that they provisionally suspend judgment: "You will be able to form a better judgment later through more study and practice. For now, it does not matter; just go on studying and practicing."
This attitude, which reflected a view that belief was not a precondition of religious engagement but rather derived from a reasoned inquiry into the tradition, contrasted favorably in my mind with the religious traditions I had been exposed to earlier.
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Georges B.J. Dreyfus (The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: The Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk)
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KEY INSIGHTS • We must learn to lead ourselves before we can expect to effectively lead others. • Build the skills to do the job, not to get the job. • To earn credibility as a leader, we must model the desired behaviors for the group. • The best performers cultivate a high level of self-awareness. They make this an established part of their routine. • Become a learning machine. Your mode of operation is of a constant learner. • Your curiosity is the high-octane fuel that propels your growth. • Strengthened by a feedback-giving coach, purposeful practice leads to improvement. It can be difficult, sometimes frustrating work. Push through it. • The highest-performing professionals in the world work on the tiniest details of the fundamentals of their craft every day. • The framework for learning is intake/consume, test, reflect, and teach. • Don’t let your now become your ceiling. Becoming is better than being.
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Ryan Hawk (Welcome to Management: How to Grow from Top Performer to Excellent Leader)
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More broadly speaking, the milieus in which children spend their early years exert a very strong impact on the standards by which they subsequently judge the world around them. Whether in relation to fashion, food, geographical environment, or manner of speaking, models initially encountered by children continue to affect their tastes and preferences indefinitely, and these preferences prove very difficult to change. Closely related to standards of taste are an emerging set of beliefs about which behaviors are good and which values are the be cherished. In most cases, these standards initially reflect quite faithfully the value system encountered at home, at church, and at preschool or elementary school. Values with respect to behavior (you should not steal, you should salute the flag) and sets of beliefs (my country, right or wrong, all mommies are perfect, God is monitoring all of your actions) often exert a very powerful effect on children's actions and reactions. In some cultures, a line is drawn early between the moral sphere, where violations merit severe sanctions, and the conventional sphere, where practices are evaluated along a single dimension of morality. Even—and perhaps especially—when children are not conscious of the source and of the controversy surrounding these beliefs and values, unfortunate clashes may occur when they meet others raised with a contrasting set of values. It is assuredly no accident that Lenin and the Jesuits agreed on one precept: Let me have a child until the age of seven, and I will have that child for life.
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Howard Gardner (The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think And How Schools Should Teach)
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Children not only think better as they mature; they also become capable of thinking about their own mental processes. Memory capacity may not expand in any real sense, but children (and adults) learn how to boost their recall by various strategies, ranging from the ways in which they group or store things to the kinds of tally systems they utilize on paper or in their heads. Children also learn to think about their own problem-solving activities: How can I best handle a new challenge? Which system or which tool would be useful? Who can I turn to for help? What is relevant and what is irrelevant to a problem I am trying to solve or a principle I am seeking to discover or master? Often these lessons are learned by watching others reflect on their memories or their thinking processes, by mastering practices common in the culture, or by following oft-repeated adages; even left pretty much to their own devices, however, in seems reasonable to assume that nearly all youngsters will improve somewhat in the "metacognitive" areas between the age of seven and adulthood (which itself begins at markedly different ages across cultures).
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Howard Gardner (The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think And How Schools Should Teach)
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The metaphorical habit of mind, one of the principal fruits of practicing poetry, allows us to penetrate
walls of abstraction and arrive at truths accessible only by its means. Metaphor teaches us radical connectedness: that in this world of the five senses, all things bear meaning in relation to one another.
Think, for instance, how richly and consistently biblical metaphors reaffirm our relationship to the natural world and in doing so teach us about our relationship to God. Images of water, rock, light, fire, and wind enable us to recognize the movement of the Spirit in all of creation. Images of food - bread and wine, milk and honey, meat and drink - offer particular insight into the radical intimacy of a God who enters into and participates in the most physical facts of life in the body. Animal images - the dove, the raven, the lion, the great fish - invite us to reflect on our likeness to other orders of being. And images drawn from human occupation - builder and shepherd, bridegroom and bride, warrior and king, father, mother, and child - not only mirror the rich diversity of relationship necessary to human community, but also show how all of those are gathered into relationship with a God who is more variously and persistently present than we think.
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Marilyn Chandler McEntyre (Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies)
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However, little evidence exists to suggest that doctoral programs support the development of doctoral students as teachers, let alone as interculturally aware teachers. Teaching development is not integrated in program requirements. We are not aware of doctoral-level qualifying exams that evaluate one’s capacity to teach in addition to theory, content, and research capabilities. Even when teaching assistantships are available for funding and accruing experience, they rarely occur in the context of a programmatic approach to using that assistantship/practice to develop graduate students as educators, to generate reflection toward future and ongoing development.
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Amy Lee (Teaching Interculturally: A Framework for Integrating Disciplinary Knowledge and Intercultural Development)
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Change your name to Miles, Dean, Serge, and /or Leonard, baby, she advised her reflection in the hall; light of that afternoon's vanity mirror. Either way, they'll call it paranoia. They. Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too, sweetie. Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you, so expensive and elaborate, involving items like the forging of stamps and ancient books, constant surveillance of your movements, planting of post horn images all over San Francisco, bribing of librarians, hiring of professional actors and Pierce Inverarity only knows what-all besides, all financed out of the estate in a way either too secret or too involved for your non-legal mind to know about even though you are co-executor, so labyrinthine that it must have meaning beyond just a practical joke. Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull.
Those, now that she was looking at them, she saw to be the alternatives. Those symmetrical four. She didn't like any of them, but hoped she was mentally ill; that that's all it was. That night she sat for hours, too numb even to drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vacuum. For this, oh God, was the void. There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead.
Old fillings in her teeth began to bother her. She would spend nights staring at a ceiling lit by the pink glow of San Narciso's sky. Other nights she could sleep for eighteen drugged hours and wake, enervated, hardly able to stand. In conferences with the keen, fast-talking old man who was new counsel for the estate, her attention span could often be measured in seconds, and she laughed nervously more than she spoke. Waves of nausea, lasting five to ten minutes, would strike her at random, cause her deep misery, then vanish as if they had never been. There were headaches, nightmares, menstrual pains. One day she drove into L.A., picked a doctor at random from the phone book, went to her, told her she thought she was pregnant. They arranged for tests. Oedipa gave her name as Grace Bortz and didn't show up for her next appointment.
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Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)
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Consider undertaking the vows and practice of a Bodhisattva. In taking these vows you will join with the hundreds of thousands of Buddhists in the west and millions in Asia who have done so. As is traditional, you might seek out a Buddhist center or temple and take the Bodhisattva vow in the presence of a teacher. Or, if you cannot do so, you can take them at home. Create a sacred space and place there the images of Bodhisattvas or Buddhas who have gone before you. If you wish, invite a friend or friends to be your witness. Sit quietly for a time and reflect on the beauty and value of a life dedicated to the benefit of all. When you are ready, add any meaningful ritual, the lighting of candles, the taking of refuge. Then recite your vows. Here is one traditional version, but there are many others: Suffering beings are numberless, I vow to liberate them all. Attachment is inexhaustible, I vow to release it all. The gates to truth are numberless, I vow to master them all. The way of awakening is supreme, I vow to realize… You can modify the language of these vows so that they speak your deepest dedication. Then you can repeat them every time you sit in meditation, to direct and dedicate your practice.
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Jack Kornfield (The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology)
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For whoever holds love and compassion in high esteem, the practice of tolerance is essential, and it requires an enemy. We must be grateful to our enemies, then, because they help us best engender a serene mind! Anger and hatred are the real enemies that we must confront and defeat, not the “enemies” who appear from time to time in our lives.
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Dalai Lama XIV (My Spiritual Journey: Personal Reflections, Teachings, and Talks)
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There is a real correspondence between biological and psychological masculinity and femininity on the one hand, and spiritual masculinity and femininity on the other. What one must bear in mind is that the Bodhisattva combines both. This may seem strange, but the Bodhisattva can be described as being psychologically and spiritually bisexual, integrating the masculine and the feminine at every level of his or her psychological and spiritual experience. This is reflected in Buddhist iconography. With some representations of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas it is hard to discern whether the figure is masculine or feminine. This iconographical convention reflects the psychological and spiritual bisexuality of the Bodhisattva, and indeed of any spiritually developed person. The idea, or even ideal, of psychological and spiritual bisexuality is unfamiliar to us in the West today, but it was known to the ancient Gnostics, one of the heretical sects of early Christianity. The teaching was quickly stamped out by the Church, but an interesting passage has been preserved in a work known as the Gospel of Thomas, which was discovered in Egypt as recently as 1945. It isn’t an orthodox Christian work, but it consists of 112 sayings attributed to Jesus after his resurrection. In the twenty-third of these sayings, Jesus is represented as saying:
'When you make the two one, and make the inside like the outside, and the outside like the inside, and the upperside like the underside, and (in such a way) that you make the man (with) the woman a single one, in order that the man is not the man and the woman is not the woman; when you make eyes in place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image; then you will go into the Kingdom.'
This is not the sort of teaching one normally encounters in church, but it is obviously of profound significance. In the context of Buddhism the idea or concept, and even the practice, of spiritual bisexuality features most graphically in the Tantra, where it is represented not just by the androgynous appearance of the Bodhisattva, but by the symbol of sexual union. Here, ksanti, the feminine aspect of the spiritual life, becomes transcendental wisdom, while energy, the masculine aspect, becomes fully realized as compassion. Thus in Tantric Buddhist art one encounters representations of a mythical form of the Buddha in sexual union with a figure who is sometimes described as the female counterpart to his own masculine form. These images are called yab-yum, yab meaning ‘father’ and yum meaning ‘mother’. They are sometimes regarded in the West as being obscene or even blasphemous, but in Tibet such symbolism is regarded as extremely sacred. It has nothing to do with sexuality in the ordinary sense; it is a representation of the highest consummation, the perfect balance, of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’, wisdom and compassion. Although there are two figures, there are not two persons. There is only one person, one Enlightened person, within whom are united reason and emotion, wisdom and compassion.
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Sangharakshita (The Bodhisattva Ideal : Wisdom and Compassion in Buddhism)