What brings us to spiritual practice? What has moved, inspired and urged you to find a clear and wholesome ‘other way’ than feeling overrun with old reactive habit patterns of sadness, fear, attachment, anger, and confusion.? Samvega is the movement of the heart/an inner response towards an urgency to practice and an urgency to awaken.

Intro to daylong on mindfulness and innovation

Dealing with criticism and staying open to creative ideas. Avoiding the traps that shut down innovation

Dharma Talk

Mindfulness is so much more that attention. Supporting wholesome qualities like patience and equanimity, Right Mindfulness specifically develops wise action in our lives and in the world.

This talk explores the concepts of self and not-self, and how we conceive of a self by clinging to sensory experiences. How do you construct the sense of being a someone, and the notion that you possess something? The process of selfing is addressed as a form of thought. We can intentionally investigate how the identification forms, what it depends upon, and liberate the mind from it's hold. Restless thinking often fuels self concepts with thoughts about me, what I desire, or the projects I am planning. The formation of identity is seductive, and even jhana states and meditative attainments can become the basis for clinging if the meditator is not watchful. As we awaken to the empty nature of mind, we might ask: will nothing be enough? Do you experience in seeing, only seeing; in hearing, only the hearing; in sensing, only sensing; in cognizing, only the cognizing? Or does the habit of conceiving of a self in experience complicate perception and cause discontent with the basic truth of emptiness?