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Retreat Dharma Talks

Madison Vipassana Retreat: A Detox for the Heart

Our heart/mind gets clogged and soured by living in a situation of stress. Stress from performance drives and anxiety are a growing problem – they even affect spiritual and contemplative practice with goal-orientation and insecurity. All this leads to an obscuration of the potential for the heart: spaciousness, groundedness, and compassion. This retreat is aimed at putting us in touch with this fundamental resource, strengthening it, and integrating it into our lives.

2018-07-14 (10 days) Madison Insight Meditation Group

  
2018-07-17 11 You Don’t Stop Craving, You Stop Believing in It 68:20
Ajahn Sucitto
The mind is a dynamic process with a certain familiarity to it that seems to reiterate and get stuck in wanting and not wanting. Liberation from this begins with not getting involved with, tussling with or pandering to the habit of craving.
2018-07-17 12 Guided Meditation: The Felt Sense of the Body 21:31
Ajahn Sucitto
Awareness is a centering place. Not pushing away, not taking a position. It’s a reference point. Rest and remain present to the experiences and expressions of the heart.
2018-07-18 13 Guided Meditation: Disengaged Awareness 39:52
Ajahn Sucitto
We’re not having an experience, we are an experience. An experience that’s changing, that’s affected. Allowing content to arise and manifest generates spaciousness and eases the sense of self.
2018-07-18 14 Allowing Innate Intelligence to Arise 55:03
Ajahn Sucitto
Two kinds of reflexes occur in the flow of experience: not knowing what to do and knowing what to do. Both are subject to suffering. Recognize that within experience there is an innate intelligence, clarity, refuge if we allow it to arise. Doing is guesswork; being is clearer.
2018-07-18 15 Q&A: I Don’t Answer Questions I Respond to People 68:00
Ajahn Sucitto
Ajahn Sucitto reflects on questions posed about breathing, how to engage with the felt sense, heedfulness vs mindfulness, metta practice and cultivating an open heart
2018-07-19 16 Right Effort: How to Strive without Getting a Hernia 55:13
Ajahn Sucitto
The Buddha crossed the floods of ignorance, sensuality and becoming by not halting and not straining. The right effort of finding ground in the body is a means for balancing and moderating energy and effort.
2018-07-19 17 Walking Instructions: Staying in Flow 4:20
Ajahn Sucitto
As we walk, we’re moving through the aggregates, through the field of mind as it opens with its senses of urgency, discord, worry. Sustain mobile mindfulness, walking through your psychological and emotional ‘weather’.
2018-07-20 18 Appropriate Attention: Comfortably Held rather than Witnessed 57:39
Ajahn Sucitto
The way we direct and hold attention either regenerates afflictive self-forming tendencies or decreases them. By relaxing attention and taking in qualities that give rise to ease and gladness, the body is more comfortable and the mind is happy.
2018-07-21 19 Careful Thinking to Be Cultivated for Wisdom and Release 37:44
Ajahn Sucitto
Used wisely thinking supports liberation. Through wise reflection we begin to understand the views and attitudes that give rise to afflictive thinking. But through patiently resisting acting on these creations, it’s possible to gain authority over one’s mind, rather than be caught in worldly currents.
2018-07-21 20 Wisdom: Detox for the Heart 59:10
Ajahn Sucitto
One of the roles of wisdom is to continually check the toxic influences and open to what is here naturally. The unconditioned can be found through wise reflection and handling of the uncertain and unresolvable nature of conditioned experience. When we no longer resist it or feel agitated by it, the mind is released. The mind released shines in its own luminosity and that radiance gives the heart back its strength.
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