“No one connected with this movie knew Whitney or anything about her relationship with Bobby.” “Lifetime has chosen to go ahead with the movie about Whitney in spite of my family’s objections,” Houston told ET. When the project was announced, Cissy Houston made a statement about the anticipated film, revealing that she just wanted her daughter to rest. YaYa’s breakout role as late singer Whitney Houston was marred in controversy and criticism, most especially from the singer’s family. DaCosta was the second-place finisher in the third season of “America’s Next Top Model.” She would go on to continue to make a name for herself on the big and small screen, acting in “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” and appearing in episodes of “All My Children” and “Ugly Betty.” The beauty will also appear in 2016’s “The Nice Guys,” opposite Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe, and she will star in the new NBC medical drama “Chicago Med.”Īlafia’s credits include “Cuban Hip Hop All-Stars,” “Let’s Stay Together,” and “One Night Stand.” So we give as best we can without this feeling of needing compensation, and we feel the wisdom of interconnection and interbeing.Īdapted from Joshua Bee Alafia’s Dharma Talk “ The Three Beautiful Roots: Cultivating the Three Wholesome Qualities in Unwholesome Times. There’s also a sense of generosity as being sparks of life. I might add that I think there’s some correlation with the Hawaiian aloha, which means breath of life. But I think of alobha as the inclination of the heart toward generosity. English is very different, and it’s hard to hit this concept completely. Pali is a waxing, gold, ancient language with so much functionality and so many layers to each word. That’s also one of the definitions of alobha: detachment. So that’s why this practice of giving without attachment has been so powerful. We want to be honored for our generosity in some way. This was an example where I got caught giving and expecting him to appreciate what it is for me to give-which is so often the case. It’s a sacrifice standing in the chilly weather. I have to teach tonight, I have to make dinner. I enjoy watching you play, but I also know that I have things to do. I responded with, “You do not understand what it’s like as a parent. He was having such a great time, and I said, “It’s time to go,” and he got really upset. He was on the playground, and other families were leaving. Recently, my son got really upset that we left the park after school after an hour. It’s funny, I caught myself recently expecting my son to have a sense of the sacrifices I make sometimes as a parent. I’m giving so much patience as a parent of an eight-year-old son. It’s about energy, which is really what money boils down to. It’s also important to know that generosity is not just about money. We should let ourselves be a little uncomfortable (but not so much that it’s really devastating us financially and putting us in harm’s way). The invitation, especially with the practice of dana, is to give right up into the point of discomfort and a little past it. This has been a really powerful practice in my life, not wondering or judging or thinking that the money is just going to drugs when people are asking for it, but giving without any discrimination when I can. We give to causes that we really are moved to give to. We give to the institutions that provide space for our meditation and the cultivation of our hearts. And this is why dana, which translates as giving, is done to cultivate caga, which is generosity. What can we do to cultivate a spirit that is inclined toward giving, to cultivate a heart that gives freely? We live in a time of fear of intimacy, fear of vulnerability, fear of giving, and fear of being caught out there without reciprocity. We’ve been conditioned to feel like there’s a lack, and we cling for this reason. I think a lot of us have a sense of lack. There’s a really beautiful passage where the Buddha is talking about generosity, and he says, as you’re washing your alms bowl in the river, just having the generosity of thinking of how the debris and grains of rice can feed the river life just having this generosity that everything we do can affect others in a positive way if we have the mind to offer it that way. It requires a commitment to coming back into the now. We have to be generous to ourselves we have to commit to being authentic and actually undergo this purification of the heart, this journey into healing each wound of the heart and having the courage to face them. It requires so much generosity to practice. It’s no mystery that Siddhartha Gautama and his wife Yasodhara (I like to call them “the collective Buddha”) taught generosity first whenever traveling to a new town or village. Developing and cultivating a heart that is inclined toward generosity is not easy.
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