Today’s world is filled with challenging issues that often push us to our emotional boundaries. With complex issues that include environmental challenges like climate change, social injustices, racism, terrorism and other forms of moral distress, life can often feel overwhelming. Yet there’s hope as well as a proven path to help us cope with and face life’s challenges with renewed vigor and determination.
Friday Morning, first session
Ajahn Sucitto describes how our efforts to be good and “get it right” tend to come from a constricting place. Such efforts are accompanied by self-consciousness, criticism and stress which block access to the innate good qualities of our own heart. This talk outlines a way to move from the strategies of the head to the opening of the heart by coming into the body.
Poet Mark Nepo uses the phrase “exquisite risk” to describe our willingness to be fully alive, open, available, living true to our heart. This talk explores the challenges and blessings of taking the exquisite risk, both in becoming more intimate with our inner life, and in engaging with others from full authenticity.
This guided practice begins with a conscious breath that relaxes the body and mind, and then a body scan to awaken to the aliveness of the present moment. We then open into the natural awareness that includes the changing flow of sounds, feelings and sensations, and practice “relaxing back” when the mind gets lost in thought.
In this morning talk, Ajahn Sucitto points to a gut intelligence we all have that can be relied on to save us from the thinking mind. The thinking mind creates suffering. Our embodied (gut) intelligence is a savior, a source of safety; it always tells the truth.
