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The greatest gift is the
gift of the teachings
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Dharma Talks
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2015-09-17
Preparing the fire
66:12
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Patrick Kearney
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Tonight we follow the Buddha from Isipatana, just north of Bārāṇasī, to Uruvelā, on the near side to the Nerañjarā river. At Bārāṇasī he converts some of the commercial elite of the city, and when he has 60 arahant students sends them off on missionary journeys. The Buddha himself goes on a targeted mission to convert a community of dreadlocks-wearing (jaṭila) ascetics to his teaching. He does so by “shirt-fronting” Uruvelā-Kassapa, the senior leader of this community, with his shamanic powers, in order to prepare the way for his third teaching.
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Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre
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Month Long Retreat led by Patrick Kearney
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2015-09-14
What is Mindfulness?
55:38
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Sally Armstrong
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Mindfulness is becoming very popular in many areas of modern life: as a stress reduction, in schools, prisons, hospitals, in the workplace and so on. But what is mindfulness, and what was the Buddha talking about when he encouraged us to practice it? Right mindfulness, or Samma Sati, develops wisdom and understanding, decreasing unwholesome states of mind, increasing wholesome ones and leading us to more freedom and clarity.
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Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center
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Three-Month Retreat - Part 1
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2015-09-12
The four truths
1:16:26
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Patrick Kearney
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Having opened the hearts of his five companions with his teaching of the middle way, the Buddha now teaches the four truths of the noble ones (cattāro ariya-saccāni). These are: dukkha; its arising; its cessation; and the path leading to its cessation. This discourse centres on dukkha and craving (taṇhā), because the Buddha is concerned here with what coloured his own practice before his awakening – his sense of drivenness, of trying to get in the future something missing now.
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Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre
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Month Long Retreat led by Patrick Kearney
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2015-09-12
Reflections on Sujātā
22:23
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Ayya Tathaloka
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It was Sujata who offered rice milk to the Buddha after his extreme austerities which included living on one grain of rice a day. Sujata, a laywoman, is remembered and commemorated in the Theravada tradition as ‘The First Disciple of the Buddha,’ there even directly before his awakening.
Talk given at Aloka Vihara Forest Monastery’s International Bhikkhuni Day celebration in 2015.
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Dhammadharini
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2015-09-09
Equanimity: Equally Close To All Things
48:22
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Shaila Catherine
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Equanimity allows us to remain present and awake with the fact of things—equally close to the things we like and the things we dislike. Shaila Catherine describes the importance of developing equanimity in two arenas: 1) in response to pleasant and painful feelings, and 2) regarding the future results of our actions. Equanimity develops in meditation and in life. We can use unexpected events that we cannot control to develop equanimity. Our job is not to judge our experiences, but to be present and respond wisely. Equanimity is a beautiful mental factor that can feel like freedom, but if "I" and "mine" still operate, there is still work to be done. This talk includes many practical suggestions for cultivating equanimity.
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Insight Meditation South Bay - Silicon Valley
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2015-09-08
The fourth satipatthana
69:05
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Patrick Kearney
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Tonight we explore the fourth satipaṭṭhāna, that of tracking dharma or dharmas (dhammānupassanā). Tracking dharma (singular) involves learning the conceptual framework that gives meaning to the experiences we undergo. We learn to read our experience. When experience means something, then it can transform our life. Tracking the dharmas (plural) entails learning to perceive our experienced world as no more than a flow of phenomena, that arise and cease dependent on conditions. This represents the maturity of insight into not-self (anattā).
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Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre
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Month Long Retreat led by Patrick Kearney
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2015-09-05
The “Thinning” of the Self: Exploring and Practicing Anattā (“Not-Self”) 1: Introduction and Overview
45:58
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Donald Rothberg
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The teaching of anattā (“not-self”) points to one of the three fundamental areas of liberating insight taught by the Buddha (along with the teachings on impermanence and on suffering or dukkha). Yet anattā can very challenging and confusing for contemporary practitioners. Is there “no self” (as anattā is sometimes translated)? How do we make sense of our feelings of individuality, identity, ancestry, and vocation? How do we address our own personal experiences of woundedness, trauma, and oppression? Are these all simply to be “transcended”? How is a sense of self actually in many ways important for contemporary spiritual development, and how is working with our own individual conditioning, whether psychological or social in origin, central to our liberation? How do we integrate attending to such conditioning with opening as well to the power and energy of experiences beyond the habitual sense of self?
In this daylong, we will explore these vital questions primarily in a practical way. Using the metaphors of “thinning the self” and working with a “thick” sense of self, we will cover three aspects of practice: (1) cultivating, in several ways, the “thinning” of the self, both in meditation and in everyday life, including working with the Five Skandhas or “aggregates” of experience; (2) tracking and working with different manifestations of a “thick” sense of self, both as appearing in experience and as hidden to awareness; and (3) opening to experiencing beyond a fixed sense of self, as awareness, compassion, and responsiveness deepen.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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2015-09-05
Awareing
1:15:12
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Patrick Kearney
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Here we learn to structure our attention more loosely, to enable us to see the object of awareness within the broader context of our attentional field. When we hold an object too closely we may miss the context within which it is held, including the one who is attending to it. When we learn to hold the object more loosely, we can appreciate the context within which it is held, and understanding (sampajañña, paññā) emerges within this context.
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Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre
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Month Long Retreat led by Patrick Kearney
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2015-09-02
Learning to Respond, Not React
1:19:00
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Tara Brach
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When stressed, we often react with looping fear-thoughts, feelings and behaviors that cause harm to ourselves and/or others. This talk offers three interrelated strategies that can serve us when we’re triggered by stress, and help us find our way back to our natural wisdom, empathy and wholeness of being. By de-conditioning habitual reactivity, we are increasingly able to respond to our life circumstances in ways that serve healing and awakening.
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Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
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IMCW Wednesday Evening Talks
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2015-09-01
Make Me One with Everything
59:50
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Lama Surya Das
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Lama Surya Das speaks about his most recent book, “Make Me One with Everything, Buddhist Meditations to Awaken from the Illusion of Separation.” Becoming one with everything, by seeing through separateness, is the heart of what Lama Surya Das calls “co-meditation.” “Co” means with. So, co-meditating is not just meditating with other people, but with everything that arises. This opens the door to what Buddhists call “everyday Dharma,” which integrates mindful Dharma into daily life. Everything is the object of our meditation; there are no distractions. When we co-meditate, we are being one with everything, not against it nor apart from it. This is the meaning of “inter-being.” This is also the answer to our great loneliness and the alienation that we feel today.
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Insight Meditation South Bay - Silicon Valley
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2015-09-01
On vedana
68:34
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Patrick Kearney
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Here we explore the Buddha’s concept of vedanā, or feeling, more thoroughly. We see the intimate link between contact (phassa), the immediacy of experience, and feeling. All experience is already accompanied by feeling; or, we can say that we are already moved by this experience. We are moved toward holding by pleasant feeling (sukha vedanā), toward rejection by painful feeling (dukkha vedanā), or toward delusion by neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling (a-dukkha-(m)a-sukha vedanā). Feeling presents us with a world that we have already assessed as requiring response, and have already responded to.
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Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre
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Month Long Retreat led by Patrick Kearney
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2015-08-30
Tracking elements
56:58
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Patrick Kearney
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We begin by discussing our relationship to body, how we find ourselves alienated from the experience of body because of our habit of experiencing body from the outside, as it were. We experience our body through our mental images of our body; how we imagine it looks from the outside, rather than how it actually feels from the inside. Then we experiment with the four mahābhūta, or “great appearances,” earth element (pathavī dhātu), air element (vayo dhātu), fire element (tejo dhātu) and water element (āpo dhātu). These represent the elemental qualities of the body, as sensed from inside the body rather than imagined from beyond the body.
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Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre
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Month Long Retreat led by Patrick Kearney
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