The inability to feel difficult emotions causes closure of heart and body. If things haven’t been allowed to arise, they don’t pass. Using the practice of calming and insight, we calm just enough to make difficult feeling manageable and let it move through the body, then apply the skill of insight to look into just this experience without proliferation. Dispassion, clarity, and a wide attentive heart remain.
The function of 'samadhi'-concentration, unification, absorption, jhana, in the service of awakening. How samadhi is cultivated, sustained and practiced traditionally as well as personally. What arouses and sustains ones investigative awareness in formal meditation and life? The joy of samadhi.
Relationship of tanha to chanda. How to arouse urgency for someone whose sankharas are geared more toward on desire? How to contemplate kamma as an object? How does wholesome “becoming” (bhava) happen?
[Citing from AN4:171] The ignorance that underlies volition conditions our ways of perceiving and being. As a result we bring stress and pressure into our bodies, hearts and minds. We train to come out of this by moderating attention and gentle persistence to everyday tasks. Communing with nature is also a resource.
Is mano essentially the same as citta sankhara;? Is there awareness besides sense consciousness? Clarification between sati/mindfulness and citta. Is mindfulness of body necessary for liberation, why? Difference between circumstances and conditions; how to “eradicate” self-view.
Referring to the Madhupiṇḍika Sutta, The Honeyball, (MN18), Ajahn Sucitto describes a two-fold training to get a handle on and curtail mental proliferation. Citta can be trained through deliberate attention to starve afflictive intentions, and to instead establish pāramī tendencies towards renunciation, clarity and patience.
This guided meditation awakens our awareness within our body, extends to include sound, and invites a resting as awareness that includes all passing waves of experience.
Anxiety and the fear of failure is a pervasive suffering around the world. It is also increasing—along with the pace of life, over-consuming, addiction, noise, polarization and fears for our planet. How do we calm ourselves in a way that brings inner freedom and serves the healing of our larger world? These two talks explore the power of awareness in evolving ourselves beyond the anxiety that grips and confines our lives.
