When we experience others through a conditioned lens of wants and fears, and of unexamined beliefs, we react in ways that cause distance and sometimes obvious injury. This talk explores how we create separation from others, and the ways we can awaken from this trance and live from genuine empathy and wisdom.
We start with an aversive or attractive response to the body or body part, and quickly an emotional attitude arises that fixates upon the appearance; a story is formed, an opinion is held, and our body is made into something it never was. To love the whole of the body requires an intentional reversal of stepping out of those perceptual fixations and embracing the pleasant and unpleasant components in totality.
Exploration of ardent energy (atapa), clear comprehension (sampajanna), "having put away covetousness and discontent for the world (vineyya loke abhijjha domanassam), mindfulness.
The vital difference between mindfulness and right mindfulness. What does it mean to have direct experience of the body? Simple practices to develop the "felt sense" of the body.
Relating Wisely with Fear Part 1 and 2 - While fear is essential to survival, it can also strangle our capacity to live fully and awaken spiritually. These two talks explore how fear takes over our lives, and the ways we can train our attention to free ourselves from its grip.
This talk, in honor of Wesak, looks at the Buddha's life both as the story of an actual person, and as an archetypal story of a spiritual journey, exploring some of the ways that his life & journey may relate to and inform our practice as we follow in his footsteps.
Relating Wisely with Fear Part 1 and 2 - While fear is essential to survival, it can also strangle our capacity to live fully and awaken spiritually. These two talks explore how fear takes over our lives, and the ways we can train our attention to free ourselves from its grip.
Once we have accepted the fact that we cannot control the dharma, our practice opens up to the full catastrophe of living. We open first by backing away from our egoic demands and then by infusing our actions with the wisdom of the body.
We come to dharma practice with a longing for freedom. This talk explores both the longing, in its importance for awakening the heart and nourishing the spiritual journey, and the Freedom of Being - our capacity to fully and freely inhabit and respond to life, to which this longing points.
Breaking the Chains of Craving: Part 4, with guest Kevin Griffin. Beginning introductions of Inquiring Mind publisher Alan Novidor and editor Barbara Gates.
The Buddha taught that becoming identified with "wanting mind" obscures our true nature and binds us in suffering. This talk explores a wise attitude in relating to desire, and offers three pathways towards freedom: Mindfulness of "wanting mind," trancing back desire to its source, and radical non-clinging.
The judging mind helps hold the sense of self as a static entity. Compassion allows us to be with all manifestations, however painful, allowing for healing and release.
