Online Dharma Hall session exploring practice in all four postures, and making the efforts to awaken the paramis and abandon the hindrances, and their roots and routes.
Intention is the basis for action, giving shape to what we do and who we become. Conditioned intentions around beliefs, work and security cause stress. The process of meditation takes us into the somatic domain, to the roots of the mind. Here intentions and reflexes can be reset to be lighter, more flexible and comfortable.
This talk explores tools to navigate the Cauldron of Emotions that is our changing times. The tools include working with the pain body, balancing and healing our psychology, equanimity practices, and zeroing out the mind.
Conditioned by ignorance, we can end up concocting the very scenarios we feel trapped in. The citta leaves its own center and gets stuck in conditions. Samādhi gives us the possibility of disengaging from the tangles, and allowing wisdom to be directed to the heart of the problem – ignorance and outflows. This directed wisdom can dismantle the box we unconsciously create for ourselves.
Properly establishing jhāna begins with disengagement. With eyes slightly open, downcast, poised between the inner and outer world, widen attention. Open up sensitivity of awareness without focusing on any particular object, attentive to the qualities that sustain that cool balance.
The untrained mind is always half crazy. Citta has left the safety of its home and is affected by conditions and circumstance. But it can be trained to turn back to immovable ease, to remain in the place where the floods and tides of suffering don’t go.
