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| For more information go to Gaden Samten Ling's website |
Showing posts with label tibet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tibet. Show all posts
Monday, 16 September 2019
Tuesday, 14 July 2015
Wednesday, 6 May 2015
Prayers for Nepal and Tibet
May they have faith, courage, and comfort in their suffering.
May all those who have left their bodies navigate bravely through the bardo and attain noble rebirths.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about how best to help financially, but you can certainly send positive prayers and energy right now with the meditation known as "Taking and Giving" or Tonglen.
If you're not familiar with the Tonglen meditation, please join Pema Chodron in this short video filmed in 2009 at the Omega Institute in New York.
Wednesday, 17 September 2014
Monday, 23 June 2014
The Power of Sacred Sound, June 27, 2014
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| Tibetan Singing Bowl, with Engraved Tara |
This Friday, June 27, from 7-9 pm join me at Yoga Within to make some joyful noise!
Nada Yoga, the Yoga of Sound, uses mantras, chanting, singing and storytelling to purify our hearing and speech, raising our vibrational resonance in the world and within.
Nada Yoga embraces the notion that the basic stuff of the universe is vibration, and that by resonating with it, using verbal, instrumental and subtle sound as a medium for meditation, we can not only enjoy, but elevate our lives.
No musical experience necessary!
Wednesday, 2 April 2014
Evening in Tibet, Saturday April 5, 2014
This is your last chance to purchase for tickets for Gaden Samten Ling's annual fundraising Evening in Tibet, dinner and silent auction!
- Live music!
- Tasty traditional Indian food!
- Unique silent auction items!
- Sparrow, singing kirtan style Buddhist mantras featuring original music she wrote especially for this event!
- Live auction for a one-of-a-kind fabulous butter sculpture by Kushok Lobsang Dhamchoe!
Don't miss it!
Wednesday, 19 March 2014
Ten Benefits of Burning Incense
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| Selection of Japanese, Tibetan and Ayurvedic Incense |
- Incense can cleanse and purify one.
- Incense removes poisons from one's body.
- Incense can help one stay awake.
- Incense can be a good friend when one is alone.
- Incense can help one find moments of leisure even on the busiest days.
- Incense may be used in large quantities.
- Incense may be used in small quantities.
- Incense may be kept for a long time, as it never goes bad.
- Incense may be used every day."
Stated by Ikkyu, a priest of the Rinzai sect of Japanese Buddhism in the Muromachi Era
Translated by Michiko Kohama
Monday, 9 September 2013
Tuesday, 9 April 2013
Wednesday, 26 September 2012
Wednesday, 5 September 2012
Saturday, 30 June 2012
Sattvic Movie Saturday: The Sun Behind the Clouds - Tibet's Struggle for Freedom
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| Book Handmade by Tibetan Refugee |
But the Tibetan people still struggle for autonomy, religious freedom, economic equality and cultural recognition in their homeland.
They regularly face persecution, arrest, interrogation and abuse that for most Canadians is the stuff of horror movies.
As we celebrate Canada Day, let us be grateful for our position of privilege and freedom in the world and support human rights and justice for all.
Please take the time to watch this revealing documentary. Thank you.
Click here to watch: The Sun Behind the Clouds - Tibet's Struggle for Freedom full screen on YouTube.
Saturday, 28 April 2012
Sattvic Movie Saturday: Tibetan Book of the Dead - The Great Liberation Through Hearing
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| My Bodhi Seed Mala and the Bardo Thodol |
This one from the National Film Board of Canada is as much a teaching as it is a documentary.
It is the story of a young monk's first experience visiting the home of a dying man to assist his teacher in easing the pain of passing for the man and his family.
My most vivid memory of this film is watching it in a small, makeshift theatre in Dharamsala, India filled with sweaty travellers and gentle monks.
How wonderful and otherworldly it was to crowd around a television set on thin matresses and cushions on the floor to listen to the voice of Leonard Cohen narrating these ancient and timeless teachings.
The next time I saw it was with my peers in a Literary Tibetan class at the University of Alberta. We had memorized the entire Tibetan alphabet in 48 hours and spent the rest of the course transliterating and translating lines from this text, the Bardo Thodol.
The images in the film and the stories our professor (a wonderful German woman in her last year of teaching) told us about life with her Tibetan husband have blurred in my mind.
Watching this now, I am flooded with memories from the bardo of my own existence and a new sense of urgency to wake up!
"Anything that has a shape will crumble away. Anything in a flock will disband. We are all like bees, alone in this world, buzzing and searching with no place to rest. So we offer this prayer: Delusions are as various as the reflections of the moon on a rippling sea. Beings become so easily caught in a net of confused pain.
May I develop compassion as boundless as the sky, so that all may rest in the clear light of their awareness."
Saturday, 14 April 2012
Sattvic Movie Saturday - Yogis of Tibet
But it's inspired me to launch a new series of posts called Sattvic Movie Saturday!
I'd wish you could come over tonight. We could watch a movie and eat popcorn and raw chocolate and drink chai, but here's the next best thing!
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| Staff Meeting, Sivananda Ashram, Bahamas (Me, Upper Right) |
The staff (all karma yogis/volunteers) almost never take a day or a night or even a moment off.
As Swami Brahmananda says when someone asks for one, "Does your karma take a day off?"
"No, Swamiji... sigh...", is always the answer. :-D
But once in a while in low season, someone takes the guests for evening satsang on the beach and the staff indulge like sixth graders at a sleepover, with chai and lemonade and chips and popcorn and whatever sweet treat someone can concoct in the kitchen in addition to their "real" karma yoga.
Sometimes... oh dare I say it... we even have ice creammmmmmmm.... and hang out all together and giggle and eat, enjoy a movie and a well deserved change of pace.
Some of my favorites: The Princess Bride, Kung Fu Panda, Lord of the Rings and Baraka.
Less favorite films but great memories: Oh, God! (my favorite part being Swami Brahmananda's boyish guffaws), Brother Sun, Sister Moon (it seems Brahmachari Shankar knows every song and line as well as he knows The Princess Bride) and Avatar (which I would have just walked out of, but the tahini cookies Mahadevi made were sooooooo good...)
There we're immersed in yoga 25/7. Here, yoga movies are the only ones I make time for.
So starting tonight, watch for Sattvic Movie Saturday posts and we can discuss or review the films here.
In honor of the Tibetan Heart Yoga class this morning, let's begin with Yogis of Tibet (Click here to watch full screen on YouTube).
I've got my Veggie Quesadillas ready! Go grab your snacks and a drink. Curl up and enjoy!
Let me know what you think in the comments section below!
Or email your movie suggestions to: tarawoltjen@yahoo.ca
Monday, 19 September 2011
Meditation and Momos
I can hardly believe the Tibetan Bazaar has come and gone!
Every year (this was the 19th) Gaden Samten Ling Tibetan Buddhist Meditation Society hosts a bazaar that brings the Tibetan community and their friends together for a weekend of travel and cultural presentations, music, meditation and momos!
Momos are a Tibetan and Nepali delicacy; delicious dumplings that are steamed or fried and served with hot sauce. There are different designs for different celebrations, New Year momos, birthday momos, bon voyage momos and welcome home momos, sweet momos and savory momos, each little works of art!
I look forward to the bazaar and those savory little bundles that make me Om-sick for India and especially Dharamsala, the home of the Dalai Lama in exile and the Tibetan refugees who gather around him.
I spent just a couple of weeks there several years ago practicing yoga and meditation, and volunteer teaching English to the Tibetan refugees. We read Paulo Coehlo's The Alchemist together sitting on the basketball court of a local school in tight little circles.
It was inspiring and humbling to meet these hardy and beautiful people who suffered so much, and yet maintained an attitude of dignity, courage, and kindness.
In addition to sampling momos from every restaurant we visited, I took a momo making class.
It was taught by a young man who had been a monk in Tibet but was forced to break his vows in a Chinese prison. (They made him drink beer, he told us, though I strongly suspect from talking with other escapees that was just the small part he felt ok sharing.)
In Dharamsala, he had a tiny room with a single bed, a wooden wardrobe, a small table, 2 chairs (two of us sat on his bed), and another small table which served as a counter space for the single burner he used to teach cooking classes to tourists for a living.
I can't say I learned the method all that well. I was distracted by his story. It was hot, and I was self-conscious of the nasty smell rising from my only pair of travelling shoes. It was difficult to understand his English, and impossible to ignore the monkey reaching through the bars of the one small window to steal his shoes.
He was a calm and smiling model of resilience, and it was a delicious cross-cultural reminder of the sacredness of "breaking (or baking) bread" together.
We crowded together to chop the veggies, and make the dough. We struggled to fold the tidy pleats that seal in the filling. But even our sloppy results were delicious, and the basic concept is practically universal.
For traditional momo recipes and to see Tibetan momo makers at work click here.
Each year at the bazaar, I sit with friends eating momos. We laugh, we cry. We discuss our travels, our purchases and our lives. We see the merchants and their families, the volunteers, the shoppers, and the resident teacher, Kushok Lobsang Dhamchoe greeting each other warmly.
It is something of a ritual for us. It feels like an annual real-life meditation on who we are and where we are.
And it is a great reminder of the fragility of this precious human life.
Every day,
think as you wake up,
today I am fortunate
to have woken up,
I am alive,
I have a precious human life,
I am not going to waste it,
I am going to use
all my energies
to develop myself,
to expand my heart
out to others,
to achieve enlightenment
for the benefit of all beings,
I am going to have
kind thoughts towards others,
I am not going to get angry
or think badly about others,
I am going to benefit others
as much as I can.
- H.H. the XIV Dalai Lama
So thank you everyone! It was wonderful to see you again, and to eat with you, and to laugh with you. It fed my tummy and my heart, I am so grateful!
Tashi Delek! Blessings and Good Luck! May all auspicious signs come to you!
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