TWO GARDENS

[...]

Two Gardens

You have two gardens: your own garden and that of your beloved. First, you have to take care of your own garden and master the art of gardening. In each one of us there are flowers and there is also garbage. The garbage is the anger, fear, discrimination, and jealousy within us. If you water the garbage, you will strengthen the negative seeds. If you water the flowers of compassion, understanding, and love, you will strengthen the positive seeds. What you grow is up to you.

If you don’t know how to practice selective watering in your own garden, then you won’t have enough wisdom to help water the flowers in the garden of your beloved. In cultivating your own garden well, you also help to cultivate her or his garden. Even a week of practice can make a big difference. You are more than intelligent enough to do the work. You need to take your situation in hand and not allow it to get out of control. You can do it. Every time you practice walking mindfully, investing your mind and body in every step, you are taking your situation in hand. Every time you breathe in and know you are breathing in, every time you breathe out and smile to your out-breath, you are yourself, you are your own master, and you are the gardener in your own garden. We are relying on you to take good care of your garden, so that you can help your beloved to take care of hers.

When you have succeeded with yourself and with your beloved, you become a sangha—a community of two people—and now you can be a refuge for a third person, and then for a fourth, and so on. In this way, the sangha will grow. There is mutual understanding between you and your beloved. When mutual understanding is there and communication is good, then happiness is possible, and the two of you can become a refuge for others.

If you have a difficult relationship, and you want to make peace with the other person, you have to go home to yourself. You have to go home to your garden and cultivate the flowers of peace, compassion, understanding, and joy. Only after that can you come to your partner and be patient and compassionate.

When we marry or commit to another person, we make a promise to grow together, sharing the fruit and progress of practice. It is our responsibility to take care of each other. Every time the other person does something in the direction of change and growth, we should show our appreciation.

If you have been together with your partner for some years, you may have the impression that you know everything about this person, but it’s not so. Scientists can study a speck of dust for years, and they still don’t claim to understand everything about it. If a speck of dust is that complex, how can you know everything about another person? Your partner needs your attention and your watering of his or her positive seeds. Without that attention, your relationship will wither.

[...]

Excerpted from Thich Nhat Hanh’s Introduction to “Love’s Garden: A Guide to Mindful Relationships,” by Peggy Rowe Ward and Larry Ward. © 2008 by Peggy Rowe Ward and Larry Ward. Introduction © 2008 by Unified Buddhist Church. With permission from Parallax Press, www.parallax.org.

Source: https://www.lionsroar.com/growing-together/

ALLOW TO DO SO

Becoming a buddha is not so difficult. A buddha is someone who is enlightened, capable of loving and forgiving. You know that at times you’re like that. So enjoy being a buddha. When you sit, allow the buddha in you to sit. When you walk, allow the buddha in you to walk. Enjoy your practice. If you don’t become a buddha, who will?

Thích Nhất Hạnh
Source:

Source: https://www.lionsroar.com/growing-together/

When you walk, sit, shop, 

allow the buddha in you to do so!

LIVING TOGETHER IS AN ART

[...]

We have to learn the art of creating happiness. If during your childhood, you saw your parents do things that created happiness in the family, you already know what to do. But many of us didn’t have these role models and don’t know what to do. The problem is not one of being wrong or right, but one of being more or less skillful. Living together is an art. Even with a lot of goodwill, you can still make the other person very unhappy. The substance of the art of making others happy is mindfulness. When you are mindful, you are more artful.

Thích Nhất Hạnh

[...]

Source: https://www.lionsroar.com/growing-together/

GIFTS TO REMEMBER!

WISHES TO REMEMBER!

Wishes from ...

Anita & Rob: 

- Lachen en praten / Laugh and talk! 

- Er zijn en luisteren / Be here and listen! 

Ingrid & Jos

- Zorg dat je het samen goed, gezellig hebt /

Take care each other then you will be good.

- Elkaar in je eigen waarde laten!

Do not change the other!

Hanneke &Rene

- Er zijn voor hem! Be here for him!

- Veelkleurig zijn! Be colorful!

Mieke, Janine &; Ivonne

- Het gezellig maken/ Be nice to each other!

- Jeself zijn! / Be yourself!

- Een beetje geduldig zijn & veel lachen samen!

Be a little bit patient and lots of laugh together!

to

A&H

A DAY TO REMEMBER !

1. ATLAS OF EMOTIONS

The Dalai Lama helps chart the territory of emotion.

“When we wanted to get to the New World, we needed a map. So make a map of emotions, so we can get to a calm state.”

Emotions are tricky entities. They confuse the mind and disturb perception, isolating an individual in a private sense of reality. So what to do with them? A type-cast, non-dual stance has been to banish feelings and emotions to the Neverland of illusion. They’re not real. Don’t trust them. Disown them. Now, the Dalai Lama has teamed up with Dr. Paul Ekman, his daughter Dr. Eve Ekman and a top team of psychologists to suggest otherwise. Emotions are the territory we live in: they are here to be navigated, and to navigate them, we need a map.

Dalai-LamaAs Matt Lucia recently wrote: “Out of the very intelligent need to escape, we unfolded unique strategies of fight/ flight/ freeze, to take us out of dysregulating states of intense vulnerability and groundlessness, and away from the overwhelming aliveness of the somatic and emotional worlds.” To say it more simply, we have been conditioned to fear and feel ashamed about our emotions. Responding to pressing psychological need, however, voices from the nondual community are increasingly calling for greater compassion towards our own emotions (and those of others), as vehicles of human wholeness.
In the words of Jeff Foster, “It’s becoming clearer that the real adventure, the real beauty and joy of life, lies not in being ‘nobody’, in detaching yourself from the world, in numbing yourself to feelings and denying emotions, in endlessly parroting spiritual clichés such as “there is no me” and “everything is a story”… but in rediscovering your deep humanity, in being a person again (yes, a person!), in fully engaging with life from a place of vulnerability and deep acceptance, in dancing with so-called ‘relative existence’.

But how to navigate the fields of emotion among us? Must emotions be first identified and honored in order to be seen and surrendered?

[...]

Atlas of Emotions - Dalai Lama In the Field of Emotions

https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/atlas-of-emotions-dalai-lama-in-the-fields-of-emotion/

2. ATLAS OF EMOTIONS

[...]

In an unprecedented move, the Dalai Lama recently joined forces with top psychologists of the Western world to map out this touchy-feely emotional territory. The motive? If we can navigate our emotions with grace, then we have more of a chance to remain in a state of calmness. The result is a fascinating online Atlas of Emotions, a 21st century tool for anyone feeling horrible to literally navigate their way through the contractions and repressions of living energy.

As a first step, a survey was carried out of 149 scientists (emotion scientists, neuroscientists and psychologists who are published leaders in their fields) to ascertain a consensus about the nature of emotions and the moods or states they produce.

The survey led to the conclusion that there are five categories of emotion: anger, fear, disgust, sadness and enjoyment; each with an elaborate subset of emotional states, triggers, actions and moods. Enjoyment? Yes, even emotions of joy and compassion, can disconnect us from calmness. According to the list of psychopathologies written in the Annex, joy can get fixated as Mania and/or Cyclothymia.

The interactive map lets you click through emotional phenomenon: from identifying one of the five key emotions (such as anger) through to exploring its range of layers and expressions.

The range of anger, for example, goes from a low intensity annoyance, to frustration, exasperation, argumentativeness, bitterness, vengefulness and on to full blown fury. Anger (“We’re angered by interference”) can also be clicked through to examine its common actions (insult, quarrel, be passive aggressive) and its triggers (such as rejection, mindless bureaucracy, and more). At the Annex of the Atlas, phenomena get more clinical, with listings of personality traits, psychopathology (such as antisocial personality disorder, otherwise known as sociopathy) and ‘signal and message’. The message citation for anger for example, is listed as: “Get out of my way.” Anger can carry a message ranging from dissatisfaction to threat.”

[...]

Atlas of Emotions - Dalai Lama In the Field of Emotions

https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/atlas-of-emotions-dalai-lama-in-the-fields-of-emotion/

3. ATLAS OF EMOTIONS

[...]

The backdrop to all the varied continents, valleys, peaks and rivers of emotion detailed within the interactive Atlas is calmness. “A calm, balance frame of mind is necessary to evaluate and understand our changing emotions. Calmness ideally is a baseline state, unlike emotions, which arise when triggered and then recede,” says the Atlas. In a sense, calmness is the new stillness, a nondual position from which to navigate troubled waters of emotion.

“Exploring the Atlas may increase people’s understanding of this vital feature in their life,” writes Dr. Paul Ekman who compiled the Atlas together with his daughter, Dr. Eve Ekman, through dialogues with the Dalai Lama and with funding from the Dalai Lama Trust. “We hope that teachers will use the Atlas in classrooms and that educators and therapists will use it with their clients to better understand themselves.”

“When we wanted to get to the New World, we needed a map. So make a map of emotions so we can get to a calm state,” the Dalai Lama told Dr. Ekman, according to the New York Times.

Paul Ekman met the Dalai Lama on the impetus of his daughter, Eve, who has a long-term fascination with Tibet. “From nearly the first moment that we met, I had a déjà vu experience, as if I had known the Dalai Lama all my life, as if he were the brother I never had,” says Ekman, one of America’s most pre-eminent psychologist and a co-discoverer of micro expressions with Friesen, Haggard and Isaacs. “This seemed very strange to me. I later learned from the Dalai Lama that he had the same feeling. He did not regard this at all strange because of his belief in reincarnation.”

Atlas of Emotions - Dalai Lama In the Field of Emotions

https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/atlas-of-emotions-dalai-lama-in-the-fields-of-emotion/

M. & J. - A.'s close friends 
A. & H.
all 4 

are in a calm state

at this moment.
:) :) :) 
:)

:)

CALM MIND

Calm mind brings inner strength and self-confidence, so that's very important for good health.

Dalai Lama


Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/dalai_lama

EAST & WEST

West làm bánh mì / luộc khoai tây 

East làm chả giò / bò bía

West meets East

East eats West

East and West are living happily now
... and ever after.

 

AS A FREE PERSON ...

“As a free person I can always come and go, Not caught in ideas of is and is not. Not caught in ideas of being and non-being Let your steps be leisurely.”

― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Death, No Fear

As 2 free persons, we can always 

look or not look at each other :)