Live to Love

Dear friends - spread all over the world to act out “Live to Love” today

The wish to practise together is naturally growing here in Hamburg, as some new Refuges are joining in since some month. Fortunately we can do this in the beautifully equipped working space of two of us, with a shrine, to practise together every third sunday now, before reaching out for our “Live to Love”-activities. One of our group actually comes quite far every 3rd sunday, from about 250 km distance !

Practising today we mainly focused on Tara-practise, with the inner alignement towards all the people we met so far in our “Live-to-Love”-activities, and people and beings which were important to all the participants. Also for the people in Tibet, who are involved and entangled in these major riots in the moment. Also the recently died sheep of His Holiness was included.

Again we were heading to the area around the main station seeking for homeless people asking for their needs, providing food, fruits, cookies, softdrinks, hot coffee and socks …

Today we met various very different people, from a very lonely, freezing and shy, drugaddicted man, who has many difficulties to accept support:

….. up to the leader of this little “society in society”, with his friends. We asked them about how to support for example this shy, heroin-addicted man, and they told us, that it is very difficult, when he doesn’t have the urge to change something about his addiction and to search for a doctor.

These leaders - there also exists a kind of a hierarchy - are very clear in supporting each other, and to create circumstances to get work again.

That means, for example, that they try to be as clean as possible, that they care for their living space, polishing the marble tiles in front of the shop where they are staying, and sweep the street there in arrangement with the shopkeeper, who allows them to be there.
In arranging their sleepingbags and keeping little possessions, they are very neat.
One of them now found a little flat and a job, cooking for his friends from time to time.

Walking along the biggest shopping malls here, it touches quite strangely, looking in the face of a shivering, tired young woman, lying on the wet stonefloor - and in the next window you see the perfect Make-up-face of a supermodel. One world.

Back in Paris in January, people there told me, that in Paris it can be very easy to be washed into the streets, after one month without having a job …
I think in Germany maybe it takes a little longer - but for more and more people it gets more difficult these days.

Just some impressions, how they live out there:

One can read a lot in their faces and being: how they care about themselves and for others, how they speak and tell something …
Deep and precious teachings for us, as His Holiness clarified again in his last comments on “Live to Love”. Thank you !

The deep feeling arises that these days of reaching out give a big impact, through making these experiences, and are changing our life and practise.

Jigme Yoenten (Juergen) and Hamburg Sangha