How do you see it?

If meditation gradually shifts how we see the world, a community of meditators has the extra benefit of giving us a glimpse of how other meditators see it.  Our website and this blog is a great place for sharing what you see, whether it’s an event like what happened at an event, thoughts on your experience or even what you see on the streets of Portland.

This is what Kat Pruett saw on the streets during a recent Level IV weekend retreat:

Kat Pruett - Mandala Sewer Cover -

She sent it along with this quote from Pema Chodron’s “Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change” that seemed to go with it:

“Each person’s life is like a mandala- a vast, limitless circle. We stand in the center of our own circle, and everything we see, hear and think forms the mandala of our life. We enter a room, and the room is our mandala. We get on the subway, and the subway car is our mandala, down to the teenager checking messages on her iPhone and the homeless man slumped in the corner. We go for a hike in the mountains, and everything as far as we can see is our mandala: the clouds, the trees, the snow on the peeks, even the rattlesnake coiled in the corner. We’re lying in a hospital bed, and the hospital is our mandala. We don’t set it up, we don’t get to choose what or who shows up in it. It is, As Chogyam Trungpa said, “the mandala that is never arranged but is always complete.” And we embrace it just as it is.

Everything that shows up in your mandala is a vehicle for your awakening. From this point of view, awakening is right at your fingertips continually. There’s not a drop of rain or a pile of dog poop that appears in your life that isn’t the manifestation of enlightened energy, that isn’t a doorway to sacred world. But it’s up to you whether your life is a mandala of neurosis or a mandala of sanity.”

If you want to share something that others in our community would appreciate, send it along!

— John Smith

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