Value ignorance as much as knowledge

Offer yourself to the world—your energies, your gifts, your visions, your heart—with open-hearted generosity. But understand that when you live that way you will soon learn how little you know and how easy it is to fail. To grow in love and service, you, I, all of us, must value ignorance as much as knowledge and failure as much as success. I know this is ironic advice..., but clinging to what you already know and do well is the path to an unlived life. So, cultivate beginner’s mind, walk straight into your not knowing, and take the risk of failing and falling again and again, then getting up again and again to learn. That’s the path to a life lived large in service of love, truth, and justice.

~ Parker J. Palmer, commencement address at Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado, May 10, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaOFkumhcCU

The price of freedom

"[W]hile we offer the teaching freely, that doesn’t mean that it comes without a significant price, a steep one at that, and that price is the courage to place yourself inside an alchemical crucible of body and mind, to play with balance in the sitting posture for long hours, to confront the way in which you inhibit your breath, to relax your habitual patterns of resistance and undergo a profound process of transformation. Nothing could be more natural, but don’t think that shifting our patterns of body and mind 180 degrees is the proverbial piece of cake. Our mind is evidently far more drawn to continuing along in the groove of its confusion, and our body apparently prefers the familiarity of its holding patterns to the at times wild ride of relaxing and dissolving them. But when we’re able to make this shift, when we have the courage to face what we’ve been resisting for so very long, wonderful things can start to happen, and whatever we have to do to enact this shift in consciousness—from the unnatural back to the natural—is a price well worth paying."

~ Will Johnson, Embodiment.net

BGR Seattle events

Seattle Walk to Feed the Hungry with Bhikkhu Bodhi

October 16 - Public Talk

October 17 - Walk to Feed the Hungry

Buddhist Global Relief's annual Walk to Feed the Hungry highlights the important issue of global hunger. This year the Seattle Walk will take place on Saturday October 17.  

The Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi, the founder of Buddhist Global Relief (BGR), is known around the world as a leading scholar-monk and translator. We are very happy that he will be attending the Seattle Walk to Feed the Hungry for the first time this year.

Bhikkhu Bodhi will also give a public talk on "Forging a Moral Vision in an Age of Crisis" at 7:00 p.m. on Friday October 16 at the Seattle Insight Meditation Society, 2729 - 6th Ave South. For more information visit seattleinsight.org.

Everyone is welcome to participate in the Walk to Feed the Hungry, a community event sponsored by Buddhist Global Relief and the Northwest Dharma Association. The Walk will begin at 9:00 a.m. on Saturday October 17, at Volunteer Park on Capitol Hill. We'll walk a couple miles on Capitol Hill and then return to the Park, where Bhikkhu Bodhi will give a talk.

Even if you can't join us on the Walk, you can make a donation to Buddhist Global Relief’s work by visiting Seattle BGR's First Giving page.

Buddhist Global Relief was founded in 2007 as a relief organization dedicated to alleviating chronic malnutrition and hunger around the world. BGR's Walks to Feed the Hungry take place in cities across the United States and abroad. To date, BGR has supported over 70 projects in aid, education, and agriculture around the globe including Asia, Africa, Haiti, and the United States. For more information, please visit buddhistglobalrelief.org

BGR Media Contact 

Carla Prater, Assistant Director 

Email: cprater@buddhistglobalrelief.org