How do we bridge the seeing gap between silent mediation and our lives relationships? Reflections and tools for broadening our sense of awakening.

Salient notions and practices for self and others...

On this renunciant retreat, we have been encouraged to rest back into simplicity. Letting go of the emotional uprisings and self-identification, shift into the presence of embodiment here and now. Here we find the capacity that’s able to be with and not waiver.

We practice to develop skillful reflexes in response to our human condition. Use body as a reference point when unplugging from mind’s unskillful habits and reactions. Meditation is an occasion to sense the quality of ungrasping and letting go.

We can bear witness to each others’ suffering by recognizing genuine spiritual friends or kalyānamitta who share our values and our desire for awakening. Spiritual friends can help us identify our individual pitfalls and support our letting go of these obstacles. It is a joy to share the Dhamma together.

Introduction to loving kindness practice and guided instructions.

Mind can be useful, but keep it in its place, the world of abstractions. It doesn’t do well in the living organic world. Meet the inconclusive impossibilities of life with heart’s fundamental quality to open and include.

A review of the key teachings – how to practice with body, heart and mind in a way that leads to liberation. Firming up faith, restraining from unskillful habits, exerting the mind in skillful investigations, enjoyment and contentment of the mind.

Contemplation on Dana

What is your conflict-the facts; In the body-mind; your internal strategies; both. Gregory Kramer with Gina Sharpe

Listen Deeply - Speak the Truth Expression and Vibration

The development of insight comes from feeling experience as it arises. Detachment, dispassion and relinquishment enable the allowing of phenomena, witnessing of change, and letting go of making it personal. We’re able to be truly present and in touch with what’s happening.

The stories we hold about ourselves or others will determine our actions, through fear or inspire us to act with courage and commitment. This talk includes Andrew Harvey's brilliant reading and thoughts on Rumi's poem "Passion"

How can we avoid the pitfalls that Mara sets for us on the path? Develop Sati (mindfulness) to act as a gatekeeper that can recognize the earliest signs of delusion, ill will, and greed. At the same time, cultivate paññā, wisdom and sharp discernment to protect against unskillful speech, conduct, and intention or thought. These foundational practices will be both refuge and rescue from the snares of Mara!

The beginning of insight is knowing what’s helpful and not, recognizing causes and conditions. We learn to meet difficult thoughts and feelings in skillful ways. Calming the body, using gentle and receptive gestures, we learn to listen to and soothe the crazy mind. One starts to see that negative experiences are not the problem but the sense of self that identifies with all of it.

We’re conditioned to make a self out of sense consciousness, but everything simply arises out of causes and conditions. We practice with right view and deep attention to meet what arises directly, see it as phenomena arising and changing.

To harvest the real riches of the journey, seek refuge and protection in wisdom; and gain profound peace and happiness through the practice of loving-kindness, compassion and forgiveness. These qualities of reconciliation uphold virtue, concord, care and respect so that we can befriend what is noble and realize the truth for ourselves. Even in the darkest hour, remember what you love, awaken the highest from within you, and light the path to freedom.

Dharma Talk

We use a meditation theme like mindfulness of breathing to bring about the factors of awakening. These factors are not things we can do, they come about under the right conditions. Tend to the heart and body energies, bringing them together to hold your ground against the hinderances and make way for the factors of awakening.

As we begin our meditation, establish a reference that helps us to be with rather than be in. Be the ‘knower of the worlds’, aware of the danger and getting stuck. Body can be that reference, it gives a sense of here-ness. Widen awareness and be choosy with attention.

Exploring ways of working with thoughts and emotions on both the relative and more ultimate levels: karma and emptiness / content and process.

One of the questions answered by Dependent Origination is where our information about the world comes from, and what it is based upon. As we have seen, much of what we know is what the past allows us to know. By reflecting on the moment and commenting continually about it, we use past memories as our pathway to move forward. This imagined response (meaning these ideas we hold about reality are not based upon what is true here and now)is being organized by the brain. To show conclusively the difference, the Buddha in his famous Sabba Sutta (SN 35.23), stated that formed reality holds the six senses only: the eye & forms, ear & sounds, nose & aromas, tongue & flavors, body & tactile sensations, intellect and ideas. "That is all (there is in form)," he said, "there is nothing that can be added or subtracted from this." The Buddha is specifically showing us that all our added responses from the past about the present are actually one of the six senses arising, as all the senses do, in the present moment. This arising of ideas in the present also includes the person who seems to be receiving those very sensations. Not spoken about in this sutta is the unformed, commonly referred to as sati or awareness. Awareness holds a direct wordless knowing, which does notrefer to the mental way we usually know something by giving it a name. There is space between this wordless knowing and the formation of words in the mind. Thoughts from the mind encircle this wordless knowing when, under the veil of ignorance, the two forms of knowing are perceived as one and the same. Ignorance enmeshes form with the formless, confusing the sacred with the mundane. Once this occurs we have only the sense data and our accompanying commentary to give us the information needed to navigate the world, the wordless discernment of awareness is no longer perceived.

Breathing gets conditioned by how we live our lives – energy can be mottled and unbalanced. It is a signifier of the heart. We can take time during retreat to take samādhi as a way of life, unifying body, heart and mind to bring into fruition the factors of awakening.

We make contact with external phenomena, and the impressions and meanings resonate through the heart and mind. Make skillful contact – pick up that which is worthy, that which lifts the heart.

Meditation is a time to crystalize the training, to deeply take in and feel the teachings. In these pause moments we take heed, look deeply into the heart, come to know the experience of what stirs it up – clinging, aversion, becoming. We begin to prefer relinquishment, finding it a freer more livable options.

An investigation into the workings of karma with an emphasis on a practical understanding of this teaching as a foundation for happiness and liberation.

When we are stressed, our way of relating to each other is ego to ego. This talk explores the understandings and practices that enable us to embody "nameste": Honoring the sacred that lives through all beings.

When we remember to empty out all the distraction, all the movement, all the roughness of life, nameless, formless, without identity - we touch the shore of truth as waves touch the shores of the ocean, reaching our true home in the fullness of this moment exactly as it is.

Citta is the heart and feeling aspect of our experience. It can determine what is for our welfare, but becomes tangled and obscured by proliferation. Use deep attention to cut through the proliferations. Come out of the world of differentiation to just here now.