This first day instructions guides students who are just starting out with their practice. We learn to find our meditation anchor and work with distraction.

Developing facility with the indriya – faith, energy, mindfulness, collectedness and discernment – supports awareness of skilful states flowing and fulfilling themselves within a mindful embodiment.

Self massage helps body awareness arise. With mental intention, alternately directing and releasing activation energy around the body, we increase connectivity and provide a broad basis for mindfulness.

We start by acknowledging the mass shooting in Texas that occurred yesterday, in the context of our practicing with fear, following up an earlier guided meditation and sharing (not recorded) related to the shooting. We then look generally at the three core ways of practicing with fear, going into some depth on each: (1) cultivating mindfulness and clear seeing (wisdom), (2) working with the heart practices, and (3) acting skillfully. We then focus on how the process of awakening typically involves at each new stage an opening to fear, and also mention some of the dynamics of the "Dark Night of the Soul." Lastly, we look at how to explore and work with fear related to our social world, in terms of the three ways of practicing with fear. There follows a period of discussion.

Hindrances can be cleared through ‘mindful direct awareness’ – sati sampajañña. Such working through what blocks the potential of citta, demands humility, since it is not one’s personal self doing the work. Body is a key and potent resource.

Sati-mindfulness, or bearing in mind – is the third indriya. It is a powerful ally for liberation. With this we come out of old habits and find freshness, meaning, potency. You feel where your strength arises.

Exploring what Awakening or Nibbāna means, then exploring some words by Thomas Hubl to explore how sangha or community can develop mindfulness, mutuality and mirroring as a support for insight

We review briefly some of what we covered in the last session (April 27) on practicing with fear. We then explore the various types of fear reported in the group, what we find bringing mindfulness to hear, particularly what's experienced in the body and in the mind, and the importance of having antidotes to fear, when the level of fear is at a high level and our usual practices are not effective. We also point to the way that as we develop and move into new areas of learning, we also often open up to new fears that are part of the new territory. We close with a period of questions and sharing.

mindfulness of breathing with particular emphasis on becoming aware of pauses and beginnings

When I first entered the monasteries in Thailand and Burma, I was taught everything is anicca (impermanent), dukkha (unsatisfactory), and anatta (no-self). The reason these were repeated over and over again is because if you see these, you see with the eyes of wisdom. Because everything is changing, the more you cling and hold on, the more you suffer. To free ourselves, we need to quiet the mind through some mindfulness in meditation. Then, instead of identifying with the changing conditions, we learn to release them and turn toward consciousness itself, to rest in the knowing. My teacher Ajahn Chah called this pure awareness, "the original mind," or resting in "the one who knows." As the Jiddu Krishnamurti said, “It is the truth that liberates, and not your efforts to be free.” With practice, we discover the selflessness of experience; we shift identity. We can be in the midst of an experience, being upset or angry or caught by some problem, and then step back from it and rest in pure awareness. We let go; we release holding any thought or feeling as "I" or "mine." We release the whole sense of identification, and the conditioned world is just anicca (impermanent), dukkha (unsatisfactory), and anatta (empty of self) -- it has nothing to do with our true nature. We learn to trust pure awareness itself. This is one of the ways Ajahn Chah taught about liberation. Awakening is always here and now. Practicing this way, your life is transformed.