We believe the ordinary is boring, mundane, uninteresting, but until we embrace it in ourselves we will forever seek to escape the very freedom that ordinariness contains.
How the Five Faculties of conviction, right effort, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom, when developed and nourished, can lead to awakening. An invitation to directly experience each faculty and bring them into balance in our lives.
How keeping a resolutely loving heart is the ultimate self protection and has the potential for changing the world. Stories of people who coupled the practice of good will with working for social change -- Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Maha Ghosananda.
The talk explores action and its results. It also looks at how karma and not-self are a mutually necessary way to understand personality and the path of practice leading to the end of karma.
Bringing together the understandings of compassion and wisdom helps us to bring together the understandings of self and selflessness. We then begin to live from a bigger, more limitless heart and mind.
Is your meditation directed toward learning about who you are? What areas do you shy away from paying attention to yourself? Where are you self-protected? Do you feel the pain associated with those areas? Become increasingly aware of one of those areas and see what difference bare attention (caring attention) makes to that pain. Offer that area metta to ease the pain of looking. The pain will ease in direct proportion to your understanding of it, and understanding is achieved through direct observation.
Seeing the honest truth of the mind's delusion can teach us to develop a healthy mind and know true happiness. It is a doorway to freedom, opened through mental cultivation including loving-kindness and compassion for ourselves and all beings.
Bodhinyanarama Monastery, Stokes Valley, New Zealand
We often compare where we are now to some ideal state and get caught in the painful habit of rejecting our experience. How do we transform this habit in order to come into connection with the truth of the way things are.
