The experience of the aggregates doesn’t have to lead to suffering. Addressing the form aggregate of body, Ajahn Sucitto describes ways it teaches us, purifies the heart and mind, and can act as a source of refuge for our long-lasting welfare and benefit.
How the chain of cognition leads to proliferative thinking centred around a distorted sense of self, and how mindfulness can stop the cycle, redirecting awareness instead to transcendent dependent origination which culminates in freedom
Translation of vipassana bhumi chant; clarificiation around sutta passage that asserts that a female could never become a Buddha; why we chant the Refuge Mantra 9 times; questions around working with perception; skillful contemplation of independence; taking pleasure from food; how to recognize and clear blocked energy in the body
Citta takes the five khandhå as truth, placing faith in them to be reliable and satisfying. The Buddha likened them to murderous thieves, not trustworthy. Truth is found in our center, not the peripherals. This is where our liberation potential lies.
The aggregates themselves are not problematic, it’s our blind, desperate clinging to them that causes suffering. It’s possible for citta to radiate into the aggregates and into our lives. First what’s needed is the act of withdrawing into a place of refuge to collect and gather. Then the act of integration, bringing qualities of calm, kindness, resolve into our spee
We need firm ground to stand on before meeting the difficulties of our lives. Without that firm place, the difficulties don’t unravel –you unravel. With cultivation of the five spiritual faculties – indriyas – they become rock solid, enabling us to stand back from experience and allow it to unravel and pass.
A brief overview of mudita, appreciative joy, followed by a guided meditation offering mudita to a good friend who is experiencing success and happiness
In a field of experience, qualities that are assumed to be other people, entities or myself because of the way they’re stuck together can be seen as specific factors that are pliable and flexible. “Field awareness” means a wider span of attention where suppressed, unnoticed, unresolved energies can arise and be discharged, purifying the bodily field.
Compulsive problematic activations can be replaced with conscious deliberate ones aimed at liberation. Whether in daily activities or in the action of meditation, we can steady and calm energy by orienting around skillful signs – generosity, service, clarity – until the mind is comforted and no longer flowing down old tracks.
There is a different way to meet what arises rather than through our conditioned perceptions, one free of self, other people, the future. Place attention on what’s arising directly as it is.
After relaxing our bodies and quieting our minds, this meditation guides us to open to the changing experience of being alive. We ask ourselves two questions: “What is Happening Inside me?” and “Can I be with this?” By learning to bring an unconditional presence and an accepting Yes to our lives, we begin to touch openheartedness and freedom.
How do we awaken our natural capacities for gratitude and generosity? This talk explores the pathways of honest presence and purposeful cultivation, and offers several reflections that guide us in contacting and expressing our love.
Through teachings, poems, stories, and reference to the science related to cultivating gratitude, we explore the nature of gratitude and how to practice it.
In the search for happiness, we generally only experience the search, marked by discomfort or desperation. Relationship is key. The instructions for ānāpānasati train us to develop a more dispassionate relationship where we learn to stand in the presence of, or witness from, the edge of experience. From here the right kind of relationship, marked by non-expectation and non-aversion, can be cultivated.
The cultivation of samatha is to be able to direct one’s intentions and attention away from the afflictive activations, settling into a place where they’re not happening. This place of cooling and ceasing is to be lingered in. Here we come out of the personality and into the realm of the miraculous.
Continuing to explore mindfulness of the body in terms of its anatomical parts, four elemental qualities, and as a corpse in decay, as ways to develop a wiser relationship to our bodies
