Kaira Jewel Lingo is a Dharma teacher and lived as an ordained nun for 15 years in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Order of Interbeing, and is now based in New York. She provides individual spiritual mentoring and leads retreats internationally, offering mindfulness programs for educators, parents and youth in schools, in addition to activists, people of color, artists and families. She mentors with the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program, was lead teacher for Mindful Schools’ year long training for educators, teaches teens and adults with Inward Bound Mindfulness Education, and is a guiding teacher for One Earth Sangha. She edited Thich Nhat Hanh’s Planting Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children and has been published in numerous other books and magazines. She explores the interweaving of art, play, ecology and embodied mindfulness practice and is an InterPlay leader. Read her recent article, In Times of Crisis Call Upon the Strength of Peace, published in Lion’s Roar magazine.
This session is an invitation to come home to our body and mind so that we can meet the uncertainty of our times with courage and tenderness. With so many aspects of our lives impacted and disrupted by uncertainty and change, we will create space to care for our nervous systems, deepen connection to ourselves and others, and become intimate with the real unreliability of our circumstances and where we can nevertheless find true refuge. We will practice to hold ourselves and our communities with compassion and wisdom.
We explore the three kinds of feeling tone: pleasant, unpleasant and neutral, and also, their underlying tendencies of grasping, aversion, and ignorance. Spanning feelings that arise from the body and mind as well as worldly and unworldly vedanā, we investigate how to create space between the feeling tone and the reactivity that usually follows it so that awareness of feeling can lead to awakening.
