Hospice

This talk presents a map and overview of the path of Insight Meditation, exploring the different kinds and levels of insight available to us, the possible avenues for its development and deepening, and some of the many ways we can nurture and strengthen its unfolding.

This talk focuses on the use of inquiry and investigation in energizing a lucid, mindful presence. The interest and care that underlies wise investigation is essential in both healing difficult emotional tangles and in revealing the very nature of reality. Guided meditation included.

This talk also includes Brad Richecouer

Mind (citta) as the Buddha’s focus of investigation. As both the cause of suffering and the means to its cessation The Buddha points to two states or tendencies of mind Akusala - unwholesome, unskillful Kusala - wholesome, skillful, beneficial Suffering follows the unwholesome mind, Happiness follows the wholesome mind like a shadow that never departs. Our task, step by step, is to train the mind and supplant the unwholesome state with the wholesome states. Greed, hatred and Delusion are the root causes for the unwholesome mind. We must cultivate the factors that are the cause for the wholesome mind at three levels. Coarse - Actions, bodily or verbal. We use the five precepts to prevent unwholesome tendencies at this level. Obsessive, compulsive patterns - Thoughts, emotions. We use meditation, deep samadhi directed to an object, to see the arising of these tendencies and still the mind. Underlying tendencies, attachments - the remaining defilements We use wisdom, insight, to investigate the body and mind and see their impermanence and stop the clinging to a false self to uproot these final tendencies. This is liberation.

Includes: intention; surrender; persistence; Yin and Yang; meditation instructions; and Q&A

The wisdom of the Buddha can guide us not only in discovering inner freedom, but in healing that which divides us from each other. While conflict is inevitable--we are wired toward flight and flight when our needs are not met--it is possible to have our patterns of interpersonal reactivity be the very grounds for awakening. This talk draws on the work of Non Violent Comunications (Marshal Rosenberg) and explores how mindful communications are an interpersonal meditation that gives rise to compassion and understanding.

How does our meditation practice relate to the natural world? How does nature support our awakening. This talk explores how nature supports us to be more aware & develop awe, wonder, love, appreciation, peace and connectedness.

In meditation we can come to recognize what the mind leans upon and why – and how everything it leans on falls apart. The most stable and secure abiding is unsupported consciousness – the removal of all props – ‘this is peaceful, this is sublime.’ It leads to cessation, a place of rest.