TEACHINGS + PRACTICE
This not that.
Here not there.
Us not them.
Get in your body, your comfortable body.
Give your attention to what your heart is doing.
Soften and let yourself be.
Let go of the future, let go of the past.
Feel the love.
The secret work is neither to turn on or off any feelings that come. It is simply to ride through — not identify. This allows life to unfold freely, welcomes a reality that doesn’t have to be a personal story… simply another passing experience.
So what, who cares.
Everyone could say this phrase once a day so as not to get tangled in worrying about what others think. But, if you worry about this kind of stuff a lot, you might say it even more!
Story as Teacher
A place for paying attention to the holy everything.
the zoom womb
Radiance.
When I woke up out (of surgery), in the middle of my heart… like a flower… this center place, there came an unbelievable but true “me” going outward. A kind of love I didn’t even know could exist. It was so big and thorough and included all of you but it included all the people on the planet… all the people… the love is filling ALL of it… and with it goes enormous amounts of happiness.
Asha on meditation and a painting
”… that’s the edge, the edge that everybody who sits has to deal with, it’s the edge people are dealing with all the time. I’m sitting, I’m watching my breath go in and out, “boring, boring, boring, boring”—but it’s not boring, it’s never boring, there’s always the heartbeat, or the thrill of the massage of the breath as it comes in and it opens up the ribcage, or the hurting leg—you know when you’re sitting the hurting leg is like seven trains going by in Grand Central Station—I mean it isn’t boring. But we have these ideas about it, so basically, I’m just trying to explore the place that I feel is really peaceful and calm but not necessarily still, and not stopped—it’s all verb, everything. So, how to catch that in things that don’t grab you and make stories? Like if you look at this painting here, which is all white, and it’s horizontal, it implies land and sea and mountains and sky, but only if you want to see those. It doesn’t really imply anything. Basically, you can read into it anything you want—or you can read what it is, which is white paint on a canvas that is just enough stimulus for the eye to rest on.”
excerpted from a studio visit with Asha by Eliezer Sobel
Wild Heart Journal: Hanging out with Asha Greer
The Taos News: Lama at 50
From Asha’s retreat book 40 Days Alone:
A Picture of Asha Greer
Love can unite us.
As a human family.
This is my prayer.