The imperfectly perfect teacher: the Buddha's hesitation to teach, a lifelong ambivalence between blissful solitude and human engagement, the human & vs the ideal Buddha. How unconditioned can awakening really be? How perfectionistic are we? Equanimity not as flawless calm but as the ability to hold fluctuations with gentleness.
Looking at the second of Thich Nhat Hanh's Five Mindfulness Trainings, which he expands to include "I am committed to practicing Right Livelihood so that I can help reduce the suffering of living beings on Earth and stop contributing to climate change"
This talk traces the insight sequence of knowledge and vision of how things are - disenchantment - dispassion - release in retreat and daily life experience, with the intention of exploring the release of clinging as an accessible and understandable process that we can work with intentionally.
Impermanence through the image of the Little Prince's rose. Is everything really dukkha just because it's transient? More on samatha & vipassanā. Stages in relinquishing reactivity. The Buddha's awakening as a discovery of secular faith, connecting impermanence to beauty & care, liberation through mettā.
His (and our) addiction to both pleasure and suffering. The four efforts as different strategies of practice, moving from problem-fixing to sustaining naturally occuring non-reactivity. Samatha as settling the mind, vipassanā as understanding how that happened. The awakening factors, joy at the release of reactivity & the first jhāna.
