Dharma Talk

We use a meditation theme like mindfulness of breathing to bring about the factors of awakening. These factors are not things we can do, they come about under the right conditions. Tend to the heart and body energies, bringing them together to hold your ground against the hinderances and make way for the factors of awakening.

As we begin our meditation, establish a reference that helps us to be with rather than be in. Be the ‘knower of the worlds’, aware of the danger and getting stuck. Body can be that reference, it gives a sense of here-ness. Widen awareness and be choosy with attention.

Exploring ways of working with thoughts and emotions on both the relative and more ultimate levels: karma and emptiness / content and process.

One of the questions answered by Dependent Origination is where our information about the world comes from, and what it is based upon. As we have seen, much of what we know is what the past allows us to know. By reflecting on the moment and commenting continually about it, we use past memories as our pathway to move forward. This imagined response (meaning these ideas we hold about reality are not based upon what is true here and now)is being organized by the brain. To show conclusively the difference, the Buddha in his famous Sabba Sutta (SN 35.23), stated that formed reality holds the six senses only: the eye & forms, ear & sounds, nose & aromas, tongue & flavors, body & tactile sensations, intellect and ideas. "That is all (there is in form)," he said, "there is nothing that can be added or subtracted from this." The Buddha is specifically showing us that all our added responses from the past about the present are actually one of the six senses arising, as all the senses do, in the present moment. This arising of ideas in the present also includes the person who seems to be receiving those very sensations. Not spoken about in this sutta is the unformed, commonly referred to as sati or awareness. Awareness holds a direct wordless knowing, which does notrefer to the mental way we usually know something by giving it a name. There is space between this wordless knowing and the formation of words in the mind. Thoughts from the mind encircle this wordless knowing when, under the veil of ignorance, the two forms of knowing are perceived as one and the same. Ignorance enmeshes form with the formless, confusing the sacred with the mundane. Once this occurs we have only the sense data and our accompanying commentary to give us the information needed to navigate the world, the wordless discernment of awareness is no longer perceived.

Breathing gets conditioned by how we live our lives – energy can be mottled and unbalanced. It is a signifier of the heart. We can take time during retreat to take samādhi as a way of life, unifying body, heart and mind to bring into fruition the factors of awakening.

We make contact with external phenomena, and the impressions and meanings resonate through the heart and mind. Make skillful contact – pick up that which is worthy, that which lifts the heart.

Meditation is a time to crystalize the training, to deeply take in and feel the teachings. In these pause moments we take heed, look deeply into the heart, come to know the experience of what stirs it up – clinging, aversion, becoming. We begin to prefer relinquishment, finding it a freer more livable options.

An investigation into the workings of karma with an emphasis on a practical understanding of this teaching as a foundation for happiness and liberation.

When we are stressed, our way of relating to each other is ego to ego. This talk explores the understandings and practices that enable us to embody "nameste": Honoring the sacred that lives through all beings.

When we remember to empty out all the distraction, all the movement, all the roughness of life, nameless, formless, without identity - we touch the shore of truth as waves touch the shores of the ocean, reaching our true home in the fullness of this moment exactly as it is.

Citta is the heart and feeling aspect of our experience. It can determine what is for our welfare, but becomes tangled and obscured by proliferation. Use deep attention to cut through the proliferations. Come out of the world of differentiation to just here now.

How joy, self-hatred and gratitude relate to the tenderness of existence itself.

There is a fearlessness that we can know, where greed and anger are vanquished. It is a state of equanimity with whatever comes which no one else can pollute, disturb or destroy. There is nothing more difficult - or more noble - for a human being to realize than this indestructible peace of heart. So why would we want to dedicate ourselves to anything less than that? May we realize this precious truth for ourselves and preserve it for the benefit of all beings.

A discussion of our practice as an attempt to ground the awareness of reality -instead of getting lost in the realm of fantasy that we tend to think of, as our lives.

All conditions of this world have the nature to change: the earth, weather, governments, work, health, leisure, family, friendships and so forth. We observe these variations and consider the most critical change of all. It promises the greatest blessing – but first we must plow the interior field of goodness that yields our heart's deliverance. Faithfully, patiently, as we clear away the dust in the mind, the hindrances of greed, ill-will, fear and delusion fall away, and we abide in the clarity, serenity, and joy of the Dhamma.

The sense of self is an inadequate vehicle for dealing with life, for dealing with dukkha. Where body and heart meet can deal with it – grounded in body, steady and open in heart. Your true power will come through