Welcome to my new blog where I’ll be focusing in on one of favorite topics: Meditation. I’ve been meditating in the Mindfulness or Vipassana tradition, for about 4 years now under the tutelage of Shinzen Young. Shinzen has distilled his extensive training in Vajrayana, Zen and Vipassana traditions into his program called Basic Mindfulness and that’s where my foundation in meditation is based. A lot of what i’ll be covering in this blog will be inspired by his teachings and but I’ll also be adding dashes of other authors and teachers for good measure.
You might be wondering about the title: Beasts & Flowers. It comes from the poem “Ascent of Mount Caramel” by St. John of the Cross in which, St. John, a great Christian mystic, is describing the path to God or nothingness or zero. The gist of it is: “If want to climb this mountain, you cannot let yourself frightened by the beasts neither can you stop to pick any flowers.” I was drawn to that line since it captures the concept of equanimity, having a balance and evenness with the extremes of life, the beauty and horror. It also touches on the two sides of the fundamental nature of everything, good and evil, god and devil, positive and negative, expansion and contraction.
Stay tuned for more.
Peace,
Ryan
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