Our potential as humans is vast and deep, and can be intentionally developed. There is a way that we can learn to open to all of our experience with kindness and clarity. As we begin to find this stability of heart and mind, wisdom will emerge.This emergence of wisdom, and strengthening of compassion, are the road to our individual and collective happiness and well-being.
We all have had experiences of impermanence, suffering, and not-self, but we haven't been able to generalize these as universal characteristics of conditioned things. Meditation instructions guide us to do so, allowing insight to arise. Examples of naturally arising "insights" which occur on retreat.
An examination of wise effort, and how it gets mixed up with our habitual personal and cultural approaches to things. Why surrender is needed and what that might look like.
Understanding Saddha (faith) the first of the 5 Spiritual Faculties.
How this Buddhist version of faith is different from naive faith, authoritarian faith and consumer faith.
What is called faith when we practice this capacity of mind.
A welcoming talk for retreatants joining an on-going long retreat. Description of the process of forming community, and entering silence. An exploration of the power of motivation as retreatants turn to the Great Task.
The Buddha clearly taught that effort is necessary to liberate the mind. But we can mix up wise effort with unskillful kinds of striving. This talk is about discerning wise from unwise effort.
Faith is a loaded word for many Westerners, yet it is a key quality in
Buddhist practice. This talk clarifies what faith (saddha) isn't,
and what it is, as part of the eight fold path
Letting go of the renunciate life at the end of a long meditation retreat. How it is possible to practice as a lay person in the world. Reconnecting to the life left behind.
A description of what equanimity is, and why it is not indeference/ apathy. How equanimity develops in insight meditation, and what the state of "high equanimity" is like.
