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Dharma Talks
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2016-11-03
"The Big Shift: Learning to Open to Experience"
65:49
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James Baraz
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Our typical response to very negative or positive experiences is to contract in relation to them--either with aversion or attachment. The practice helps us cultivate a radical and much more skillful and profound relationship to them--having the courage and compassion to meet and learn from the negative as well as the wisdom to enjoy the positive while realizing its impermanence. This talk explores different qualities of heart and mind that help us do just that.
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Insight Meditation Community of Berkeley
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IMCB Regular Talks
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2016-10-10
Practicing with Views and Opinions, Cultivating Empathy
1:25:00
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Donald Rothberg
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In the context of the current election campaign as well as the context of our daily lives, we explore how to understand and practice with our views, opinions, and interpretations. We first look at the nature of views, the Buddha’s teachings on views, and three main ways to practice with views, with particular attention to being mindful of reactivity (attachment and aversion) in relation to views. We then examine the nature of empathy and how to cultivate empathy in relationship to others (and ourselves), including those with different views.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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Monday and Wednesday Talks
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2016-06-16
Mindfulness of the Body
68:30
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Shaila Catherine
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Shaila Catherine gave the second talk in a four-week series titled "Cultivating Mindfulness." Shaila explored a number of ways to practice mindfulness of the body according to the Buddhist teachings. These methods include (1) using the body as a way of grounding our attention in the present moment, (2) working with mindfulness of the breath as an aspect of the body, (3) working with sensory experiences, (4) reflecting upon death, (5) seeing the body in terms of the four elements (earth, fire, wind and water) and (6) observing the body as anatomical parts. Methods 5 and 6 allow us to view the body as material constructions. From this perspective we no longer conceive our body as "I" or "mine;" thereby, attachment and ignorance dissolve.
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Insight Meditation South Bay - Silicon Valley
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In
collection:
Cultivating Mindfulness
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2016-01-07
Impermanence: Beyond the Rise and Fall of Things that Change
51:14
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Shaila Catherine
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This talk by Shaila Catherine is the first in the speaker series "Doorways to Insight." Shaila Catherine describes the importance that is placed on recognizing and contemplating impermanence. This is one of the three main characteristics that we observe in insight meditation practices. We see and know that things change. Everything is changing—thoughts, emotions, feelings, perceptions, sensations, tastes, and emotions. But when we don't see the impermanence of things, we tend to grasp and cling to them. We tend to want to make them to last, and thereby we identify and become attached. As a result of attachment, we suffer, because they are changing anyway. Can we see beyond things that change, and realize what might be called changeless or deathless, to awaken with insight, to realize nibbana?
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Insight Meditation South Bay - Silicon Valley
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2015-08-15
Unsurpassed Treasure
26:23
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Ayya Medhanandi
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The Buddha is our unexcelled guide on the journey of a lifetime – to the end of suffering. We look within and enter the silence of the heart, leaving behind our ideas, fears, attachments, and identities to discover the treasures of pure presence – an unsurpassed happiness and freedom.
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Satipaññā Insight Meditation Toronto
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2015-05-23
Love Sex, and Awakening
46:35
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Amma Thanasanti
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Ajahn (Amma) Thanasanti's personal journey and interest in the topic. Believing enlightenment is where everyone loves me. Various kinds of suffering. The way that Dipa Ma's life was an inspiration. The hunger to connect and the way that love and sex can be used for connection. Sex as life force. Separation and dissolving into pleasure vs dissolving into emptiness. Love and sex addiction underlying other addictions. The difference between mind states that resolve with observation and those that need engagement. Attachment theory. Pleasure evokes lack. Making use of the complexity.
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Shakti Vihara (Against The Stream / Dharma Punx New York)
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2014-10-22
Part 2: Happiness
1:18:09
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Tara Brach
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The Buddha said that he would not teach about happiness if it were not possible to realize this experience of peace and deep well-being. In this three part series, we explore two kinds of happiness - that which arises out of particular causes and the experience of “happy for no reason.” The talks examine the attachments that block happiness, ways to “gladden the mind,” and the liberating presence that naturally expresses as pure happiness.
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Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
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IMCW Wednesday Evening Talks
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2014-10-15
Part 1: Happiness
1:21:12
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Tara Brach
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The Buddha said that he would not teach about happiness if it were not possible to realize this experience of peace and deep well-being. In this three part series, we explore two kinds of happiness - that which arises out of particular causes and the experience of “happy for no reason.” The talks examine the attachments that block happiness, ways to “gladden the mind,” and the liberating presence that naturally expresses as pure happiness.
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Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
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IMCW Wednesday Evening Talks
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2014-10-14
Many Kinds of Thoughts
41:01
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Shaila Catherine
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This talk was given by Shaila Catherine as a part of the series "Enhancing Mindfulness Skills: A Seven-Week Series Dedicated to Cultivating Transformative Insight."
Mindful of the thinking process, we explore how thoughts function in our lives. Unwholesome mental patterns can reinforce obsessive desires, identification, rigid opinions, and attachment to belief systems. What patterns are most common for you—planning, rumination, fantasy, rehearsing, daydreaming, judging, comparing, fixing, instructing? We observe the types of thoughts that arise, and reflect on whether those thoughts support our values and purpose. We learn to let go of unskillful thoughts and then focus our attention so that we use the mind skillfully. Buddhist tradition identifies three sources for proliferating thought: craving, conceit, and views. By examining the sources of conceptual proliferation, we can curb the wandering tendencies of mind.
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Insight Meditation South Bay - Silicon Valley
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2014-07-22
The Rebellious Path of Freedom from Habits of Mind
42:49
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Jason Murphy
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This talk was given as a part of the series "Where Rubber Meets the Road: A Series on Mindful Living." Vipassana takes our untrained mind as a starting point -- with its unruliness, hindrances, clinging and aversion -- and gives it a clear and systematic way of developing awareness. With practice, this awareness of what's happening within us and around us in any given moment is the key to not being a slave to our thoughts. It also teaches us to rebel against, or turn away from, our mind's tendencies towards greed, hatred and delusion; and instead, to incline our mind towards openness, freedom from attachment, freedom from suffering, loving-kindness, compassion, wisdom, and equanimity. This is the liberating power of awareness and mindfulness.
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Insight Meditation South Bay - Silicon Valley
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Tuesday Talks
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In
collection:
Where Rubber Meets the Road: A Series on Mindful Living
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2013-09-18
Spiritual Urgency – Samvega
58:53
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Marcia Rose
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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.
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Cambridge Insight Meditation Center
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2013-08-20
Five Preconditions for Insight: Engage in Talk of the Dhamma (the third precondition)
21:35
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Shaila Catherine
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The Buddha taught that there are five preconditions necessary for the development of meditation practice in seclusion—good friends, virtue and restraint,
engaging in talk on the Dhamma, wise effort, wisdom. These preconditions, presented in the Meghiya Sutta, are developed progressively and support one another. This talk explores the importance of engaging in dhamma talk, reflecting on the teachings, and wise speech as ways of nurturing the path of awakening. How do you know when to speak and when to remain silent? What kind of speech is most true and useful? What types of conversation will distract you from your goals, or support the realization of nibbana? Does your engagement in conversation encourage attachments, identification, self-grasping, or does it nurture letting go, release, and peace?
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Insight Meditation South Bay - Silicon Valley
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Tuesday Talks
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2013-05-28
I-Making & Mine-Making Constructing Self
39:21
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Shaila Catherine
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How is a sense of self constructed? What is the concept of not-self in Buddhist practice? How do we construct identity? This talk explores the traditional model of the five aggregates affected by clinging and explains how clinging occurs in contact with sensory experience. The five aggregates—materiality, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness—represent an early Buddhist model for understanding how suffering forms through misperception. Clinging to misperceptions produces a sense of continuity in experience that we conventionally call "I", and a relationship to experience the we conventionally call "mine". This model clarifies the precise objects contemplated in vipassana (insight) meditation practice. This talk explains each aggregate so that insight may liberate the mind from this subtle type of attachment.
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Insight Meditation South Bay - Silicon Valley
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Tuesday Talks
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2013-04-20
Connecting Inner and Outer Responses to Climate Change
37:37
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Donald Rothberg
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At this time of climate disruption, we need powerful responses--integrating more "inner" spiritual practices and principles, on the one hand, with skill in "outer" responses, on the other. This integration or marriage can happen in many ways as we participate in the "great turning"--whether our primary emphasis, to use Joanna Macy's analysis, is stopping further damage from occurring, transforming our institutions, or helping to shift consciousness. Without this integration, however, spiritual practice runs the risk of becoming a kind of middle-class escapism and activism runs the risk of being caught in self-righteousness, attachment to views, demonization of the "enemy," and burnout. We need a new integration! We look at several dharma principles that can be the basis for such an integration, consider briefly how Spirit Rock is responding (and might respond further) to climate issues, and especially look at the figure of the bodhisattva.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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Responses to Climate Change: Awareness, Action and Celebration
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In
collection:
Responses to Climate Change: Awareness, Action and Celebration
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2012-02-21
Danger of Fixation
36:05
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Shaila Catherine
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How does suffering manifest in attachment to views? This talk explores right view and addresses the danger of attaching to a position, philosophy, belief, or opinion. Primary sources are the teachings from the Middle Length discourses numbers 72 and 74. Recognizing the dangers of attachment and clinging to beliefs and opinions, we directly investigate what can be known in the mind and body. This is a pragmatic path of mindful awareness that results in actions that are immediately liberating.
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Insight Meditation South Bay - Silicon Valley
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Tuesday Talks—2012
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In
collection:
Buddhist Perspectives on Right View
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2012-02-07
Opinions and Truth
41:14
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Shaila Catherine
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Our views, beliefs, and opinions affect our perception of events. To what extent do we assume that we are right and become attached to our opinions? With attachment to views we solidify a sense of self. Mindfulness meditation invites us to observe our relationship to views and opinions and see how it might be distorting perception by reinforcing a fixed sense of self. The term "right view" does not imply a more accurate or factual perspective; rather, right view describes a perspective beyond all attachment to views and opinions.
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Insight Meditation South Bay - Silicon Valley
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Tuesday Talks
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In
collection:
Buddhist Perspectives on Right View
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2012-01-24
Buddhist Perspectives on Right View
3:23:09
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Shaila Catherine
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Right view appears as the first step of training in the Noble Eight-Fold Path. It leads to an integrated understanding of the liberating teachings of the Buddha and the successful development of meditation and wisdom. Right view is essential to understanding the causes and the end of suffering. Without right view awakening is impossible, and wrong view is considered the insidious obstacle to all progress. In this six-week series Shaila explores right view from several perspectives found in the discourses of the Buddha. Related themes of wise attention, concepts of liberation, truthfulness, false beliefs, attachment to opinions, kamma, cause and effect, learning and peaceful engagement in discussion will bring this traditional theme to life in our contemporary practice.
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Insight Meditation South Bay - Silicon Valley
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2011-11-28
Freedom From Attachment
48:40
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Mark Coleman
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How do you work with desire and attachment in the midst of daily life? Buddhist teachings give clear guidance on the power of exploring and understanding how the process of attachment arises and how we can cultivate a healthy relationship to desire and the sensory world. Mark gives many anecdotes from his personal journey with this theme.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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2011-11-23
The Problem With Greed
50:19
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Winnie Nazarko
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Our relationship with sense pleasure is complicated. Moving towards what is pleasant is instinctual,and we need to be able to experience what is pleasant without clinging, fear or attachment in order to be whole. Yet pleasant vedana (sensation) is not a reliable goal or guide on the spiritual path. Pleasure - like all conditioned things - has its limitations and does not work well as the orienting principle in our practice and lives. Like the Buddha, we need to be able to swim upstream, and not be limited by our conditioning towards ease.
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Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center
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Three-Month Retreat - Part 2
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2011-07-19
A Raft to Nibbana
29:08
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Ayya Medhanandi
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What else is there to do in this life but know the truth of what we are and deepen in wisdom and compassion. Our spiritual map leads us out of the darkness to a purity and clarity of understanding. Here we are, secure in the raft of the heart, braving the tempestuous currents of the world. Yet we are forever tuned to awareness of our true nature. We carefully examine our attachments and let go, guided to freedom from the poisons and dangers of the world. At last, we shall know the irreversible and liberating joys of the Way.
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Ottawa Buddhist Society
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2011-06-03
Opening Talk for Transforming Self, Transforming World
67:12
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David Loy
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Opening Talk for a retreat that explores the relationship between personal and social transformation. There are profound parallels between our individual predicament and our collective situation, and this retreat explores their nonduality. If the self is an insecure construct haunted by a sense of lack, we gain insight into our preoccupation with attachments such as money, fame, power and romance, and how the 'three poisons' (greed, ill will and delusion) have become institutionalised.
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Gaia House
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Transforming Self Transforming World
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2009-05-13
The Four Great Attachments
62:09
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Sharda Rogell
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In the second noble truth, the Buddha tells us that the cause of our suffering is craving that leads to attachment. This talk is an exploration of what the Buddha calls our four most conditioned attachments and why we need to let go of them.
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Wood Acres Retreat Center
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Our Wisdom Heart
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2009-04-21
Mind is the Core
47:36
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Bhikkhu Bodhi
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Mind (citta) as the Buddha’s focus of investigation.
As both the cause of suffering and the means to its cessation
The Buddha points to two states or tendencies of mind
Akusala - unwholesome, unskillful
Kusala - wholesome, skillful, beneficial
Suffering follows the unwholesome mind, Happiness follows the wholesome mind like a shadow that never departs.
Our task, step by step, is to train the mind and supplant the unwholesome state with the wholesome states.
Greed, hatred and Delusion are the root causes for the unwholesome mind.
We must cultivate the factors that are the cause for the wholesome mind at three levels.
Coarse - Actions, bodily or verbal. We use the five precepts to prevent unwholesome tendencies at this level. Obsessive, compulsive patterns - Thoughts, emotions. We use meditation, deep samadhi directed to an object, to see the arising of these tendencies and still the mind. Underlying tendencies, attachments - the remaining defilements We use wisdom, insight, to investigate the body and mind and see their impermanence and stop the clinging to a false self to uproot these final tendencies. This is liberation.
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Insight Meditation South Bay - Silicon Valley
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2009-03-16
Barefoot and Empty-handed
40:41
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Ayya Medhanandi
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Developing awakened wisdom is an organic process, the unbinding of all problems that leads to indestructible peace and harmlessness. We undertake and persevere through training the mind so that we can renounce our attachments and stop the interior whirling of the world. No longer caught in its duality, we rest in knowing the liberating truth of this moment, cessation of suffering and a transcendent healing that takes us to the Deathless.
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Ottawa Buddhist Society
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2009-03-10
Simplicity Of Being
40:20
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Shaila Catherine
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Be as you are. This talk encourages a spacious and accepting attitude that embraces experience just as it is occurring. It is inspired by non-meditation approaches that bring relaxation, release, and ease to awareness without the exertion or efforts of striving. Mindfulness instructions are simple: observe your experience of sensory contact, observe what occurs at any sense door. You don't need to do very much with what you observe. See what is happening; be present with what is. Several obstacles to deep presence are examined. We learn to release attachments to material stuff, to overcome the influence of social expectation, and to renounce distracting and unskillful speech. We also learn to free the mind from mental proliferation, worry, and restless wandering; to embrace precepts that protect us from doing habitual or selfish actions; and to let go of clinging whenever it arises. This approach illuminates the power of renunciation; the calming of concepts of self, I, me, and mine; and the great peace that brings an end to suffering.
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Insight Meditation South Bay - Silicon Valley
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Tuesday Talks
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2008-11-21
Living in the Truth
66:18
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Rob Burbea
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A life dedicated to discovering the Truth of things is a life lived beautifully, and leading organically to freedom from suffering. Yet we frequently approach our seeking with hidden attachments to assumptions, preconceptions and views (often about Truth or the ways it is realised) that hinder a really complete, far-reaching, open and radical inquiry. On every level, from the personal to the mystical and ultimate, how can we give free reign to the heart's longing to live the truth?
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Gaia House
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Solitary Month Retreat
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2008-08-10
Talk Three: Wise Effort and Wise Attachment
60:52
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Rob Burbea
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As we learn to develop concentration in meditation, samatha (calm, tranquility) is also developed, and together these qualities become a powerful means for deep insight and a source of profound well-being. This progressive series of talks, guided meditations and instructions explores in some detail the art of concentration, primarily through different ways of working with the breath and the body to open to deeper and deeper levels of calmness, presence and joy.
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Gaia House
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The Art Of Concentration (Samatha Meditation)
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2008-05-26
Five Guidelines For Practicing With Conflict
46:54
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Donald Rothberg
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We explore five aspects of bringing our practice to conflicts - inner, interpersonal, group, or social:
1. At the heart of such practice is transforming reactivity and responding skillfully.
Also crucial are different ways of:
2. grounding and centering in the body,
3. resting in the heart,
4. maintaining a non-dual vision, and
5. continuing to be deeply engaged and acting without attachment to immediate outcomes, once we have acted responsively.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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Path of Engagement
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