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The greatest gift is the
gift of the teachings
 
Ajahn Sucitto's Dharma Talks
Ajahn Sucitto
As a monk, I bring a strong commitment, along with the renunciate flavor, to the classic Buddhist teachings. I play with ideas, with humor and a current way of expressing the teachings, but I don't dilute them.
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2021-12-22 Guided Meditation - All Things Converge upon Feeling 49:28
Establish mindfulness with the experience of a feeling body, the most fundamental source of feeling. Use a wide form of attention that covers the whole body. As phenomena are changing the mind is still with receptivity and deep listening. The nature of sati doesn’t react to feeling. The feeling can be felt, without blaming, criticizing or getting involved. When feeling isn’t given any more food, it becomes more equanimous.
Cittaviveka At Home with the Homeless: Ajahn Sucitto Locked Down
2021-12-19 Enjoying Presence 40:53
We become entangled in the creations and reactions that arise based on ignorance. Mindfulness immersed in the body is where we can experience release from the powerful reflexes and currents. Translate the complexities of thoughts into the simplicity of emotional drives, and feel them in the body. Tune into what’s given – awareness, presence, stability – this is comfortable, this is pleasure, this is our basic ground.
Cittaviveka
2021-12-12 Experience of Being Trapped 3:16
This Covid experience can give the felt sense of being trapped, corralled in. There’s a background sense of fear and uncertainty. That’s why it’s so important to generate lovingkindness, groundedness, steadiness – soothing the community atmosphere, internally and externally.
London Insight Meditation Feel It, Breathe It, Clear It - A Guide to Emotional Management
2021-12-12 Q&A 46:27
00:00 Working with people who have suffered trauma; 05:32 Helping someone into feeling the body or breath; 06:54 Relationships with others who are not spiritual; 09:06 Relationship between energy, intension and kamma; 17:57 The felt sense of being held; 20:36 Feelings of negativity when verbally attacked by family members; 23:24 Feeling sleepy; 25:29 Disorientation when trauma recedes; 28:55 The thinking mind; 32:02 When something is stuck; 34:27 Samādhi and concentration; 42:00 Is chanting helpful to the practice.
London Insight Meditation Feel It, Breathe It, Clear It - A Guide to Emotional Management
2021-12-12 Guided Meditation – Being Loved by Your Own Breathing 32:15
Holding on doesn’t provide you with the deep security of being held. That deeper security comes from trusting that something can carry you and you don’t have to do it. That’s what breathing does. Mindfulness of breathing sustains the right mode of attention – steady, not seeking anything, listening intently with no particular result. Relax into that and get the sense of freedom and love.
London Insight Meditation Feel It, Breathe It, Clear It - A Guide to Emotional Management
2021-12-12 Signs and Signals 56:14
The signs and signals in the sense world very often take us out of our core presence. So we cultivate carefully honed, carefully placed signs that calm and steady us, returning us to our core presence. From this place of stability and comfort we’re able to disengage from the unskillful and meet the difficult so it can be cleared.
London Insight Meditation Feel It, Breathe It, Clear It - A Guide to Emotional Management
2021-12-12 Advice on Walking 9:40
Explore how the body moves in space when there are no boundaries, no time pressures, no destination. Feel the swing of the pelvis and shoulders, moving through your environment with fluidity. Focused on your intimate environment, you’re not grabbed by the sense world. You can deal with the external environment more wholesomely and comfortably.
London Insight Meditation Feel It, Breathe It, Clear It - A Guide to Emotional Management
In collection: A Moving Balance
2021-12-12 Finding Your Own Pleasure 46:43
Practice is actually quite simple. It involves translating the complexities of your personal circumstances into simple emotional patterns. Breathing picks up the dominant emotional signal and transfers it through the system. We want to manage that signaling system, to stop afflicting ourselves with harmful signals and heal ourselves with affirmative signals, ones that make the body feel whole and settled. At 29:45 a simple exercise to generate healing signals.
London Insight Meditation Feel It, Breathe It, Clear It - A Guide to Emotional Management
2021-12-11 Q&A 51:20
00:12 Being at ease with suffering; 08:55 Time and space; 16:09 How to sit with constant pain; 20:23 Energy is blocked in the throat; 24:42 How to fully realize and penetrate suffering; 29:50 Hyper-tension; 36:44 Not taking things personally; 42:08 How to truly forgive; 44:31 Clearing ill-will; 46:10 Liberation through the deathless.
London Insight Meditation Feel It, Breathe It, Clear It - A Guide to Emotional Management
2021-12-11 Guided Meditation – Embodied Sense of Support 15:18
Practice stepping back from the complexities and coming into the embodied sense of being supported; widen the focus to include ground and space. The problematic stuff is still problematic, but there’s a possibility to step back and inquire, "How’s that?" The heart that is balanced and free from pressure naturally experiences compassion, goodwill, equanimity.
London Insight Meditation Feel It, Breathe It, Clear It - A Guide to Emotional Management
2021-12-11 Feel What You Think 48:52
To get a handle on what we feel, we need to get past layers of "self" and into the process that establishes it. When the "self" stuff falls away the original emotional trigger can be understood and released properly. An embodied spacious presence can do that. Let the body feel an emotion, breathe it – there can be softening and a releasing, and a transformation of your emotional profile.
London Insight Meditation Feel It, Breathe It, Clear It - A Guide to Emotional Management
2021-12-11 Emotional Intelligence and Emotional Profile and Standing Meditation 52:58
Emotion is a part of our intelligence. But we can become overwhelmed by emotions, triggering reactive tendencies that create our emotional profile – and that becomes ‘me’/’myself’. It’s possible to moderate this reflexive system and manage the emotions. Begin with establishing a stable base in the body and coming into presence.
London Insight Meditation Feel It, Breathe It, Clear It - A Guide to Emotional Management
2021-11-26 Closing remarks – Refuge in this very body and mind 16:37
This is a practice that bears great fruit. In the long run it makes you into a more wakeful, less tense person. Take some time to recollect it. Put aside what you don’t need and focus on what’s absolutely essential – presence and awareness. In this very body and mind you have the perfect system to practice, and to develop the boundless heart.
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-26 Refuges and five precepts 6:19
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-26 Q&A 31:20
00:13 Working with tinnitus; 03:06 ‘sensing a way home to what I am’; 04:42 Becoming more comfortable with non-doing; 06:57 Mention not-self/anattā in the suttas; 11:26 Focusing on one point with breathing; 14:45 Feeling I should be doing something; 16:12 Building more energy in the practice as one ages; 22:32 Feeling angst about ending of the retreat; 23:15 Recollecting one’s virtues as preparation for death; 25:01 Having lost our ability to express open steady presence; 26:13 Refusing to identify with someone or some movement; 27:10 Aches in my shoulder in long sits; 29:06 Arūpa jhānas.
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-26 Guided meditation – Breathing regulates body and mind 45:12
Aspects of energy can be steadied through sustaining awareness over the entire process of an exhalation, until the inhalation begins. Help breathing to regulate your energy. Energy will regulate your mind, quiet it, steady it, compose it, and over time it will consolidate into a steady quiet form.
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-26 Bring your chaos home to be released 43:11
The suttas can give us prompts for how to practice, but the agent is this embodied heart. It’s a process of calming and steadying shared between body and heart that reveals that stable constant presence beneath the activated energies. Withdrawing energy from the activations, just witnessing the changeability of phenomena, there is dispassion and releasing. Meeting energy, not feeding it, so it can be freed.
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-26 Standing meditation - Unified energy 52:51
Practicing in standing posture, it’s much easier to feel the whole body as an undivided object. Certain things then become apparent – an unbroken unity, an energy. Stay in your energy body as agitations well up, are received, and then dissolve – because they’re energy. This is the development of true insight, to know phenomena is changeable. Therefore one becomes dispassionate towards them.
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-25 Chant - Suffusion with the divine abidings 6:56
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-25 Q&A 33:13
00:12 Dispassion; 03:45 How do dispassion, disengagement and relinquishment reconcile with activism; 12:39 Body time versus clock time; 15:23 How should I teach mindfulness of breathing; 17:42 Joy and poignant sadness; 19:38 What is one then to be sensitive to in the third stage of the feeling tetrad; 25:55 Could you say that the citta is the deathless?
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-25 Q&A 23:17
00: How to suffuse; 04:40 Placing and sensing the thinking mind; 07:14 Does Ānāpānasati help prepare us for end of civilization; 08:42 Nimittas; 10:01 When one area of body is not suffused; 11:25 How can we suffuse pīti/sukha? 13:00 Softening the process of enquiring; 15:26 Generating joy with chronic pain and vicious personal circumstances; 18:17 Blockages make nostril breathing difficult; 21:24 Can you speak about death?
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-25 Guided meditation - Gladdening the heart 38:37
Tuning into where gladness is can be approached from different ways. One can recollect people or events that are gladdening, or one can tune into the energy of gladness that is felt in the body. Linger in its effects, the brightening, lifting quality that is agreeable.
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-25 Jhāna 56:48
Jhāna is a condition that supports getting out of the conditioned realm. It gives the mind enough stability to step out of time and enough happiness to step out of the pull of sense pleasure. It makes turning away, nibbida, possible leaving an experience of something open, measureless, where the heart feels freedom from stress, freedom from pressure.
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-25 Time, craving and where they stop 51:03
Your intimate environment is not about time, it’s about kamma. Enter into this embodied world with patience, resolution, goodwill and mindfulness, holding it steadily. There’s an aware intelligence that gets stronger and wiser when you can let go of the stories; it will work for your welfare.
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-24 Q&A Saṇkhāra, self, khamma, khanda 39:39
00:48 You said, ‘I’m not a person who worries a lot, but a worry that persons too much.’ Can you say more? 02:07 I’m not clear about the term ‘volition’; 31:32 Are the suttas prescriptive (something to do) or descriptive (something that will happen anyway); 34:03 How to calm the bodily formation; 36:30 How to contemplate impermanence, dispassion, cessation and letting go?
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-24 Guided meditation – The craft of meditation 29:04
Settling into direct experience, finding a stable place within the constant tidal wave of phenomena arising. Disengaging, carefully attending. It’s a craft, feeling out how this form is best sustained, smoothed out, appreciated, lingered in. This is the craft of meditation.
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-24 Q&A 34:29
00:11 Feeling dizzy with QiGong; 00:49 Difference between calming mental activity and calming mind; 14:33 How to calm bodily activities with searing bodily pain; 16:29 Do we work sequentially on calming mental, then bodily formations, or together; 18:09 Examples of ‘accept not adopt’ particularly around past trauma; 21:04 Q6 When the hindrances calm down, what else is there to be found as citta saṇkhāra? 22:56 What does vicāra mean; 26:09 In-breath is short and painful when trying to elongate; 28:25 Should I try to smooth out bumpy breathing; 30:18 Meditative experience in terms of this social existence.
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-24 Returning to body and heart 59:30
We get conditioned to be insensitive to heart and body. To return, enter the body as an energy form, staying with it, thoroughly sensitive to the entire body. When you can feel the presence of your own embodied energy, the heart finds a refuge in that. There’s something here that stays present, grounded, firm, accepting.
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-24 Body regulates heart 39:32
You’re born into a system that knows how to regulate and discharge emotions and energy. If the energy is right, distractions and unevenness fade away, and the harmony of body and mind acts by itself. Practice asking what is needed now to bring ease, clarity and joy into your life. Use cultivation to do what’s needed, to maintain health, balance, sanity, lightness of being.
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-23 Standing meditation – Harmony of the elements 21:54
Guidance to sense into the felt body, experiencing its elemental qualities. When the elements do what they’re supposed to do, energy moves freely, harmoniously. Heart picks up the sign and feels happy, comfortable
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-23 Q&A 24:06
00:14 Doubt around ability to meditate; 19:05 Going through the sixteen steps vs. just being aware of breathing; 20:27 Significance of the quality of effort.
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-23 Guided meditation - Breathing whole body 16:43
Establishing a firm foundation and upright posture, breathing in, breathing out. Let the exhalation drain the tired, stressed energy; let the inhalation refresh embodied energy. Put attention where it needs to go to facilitate breathing in and out through the whole body.
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-23 Q&A 38:29
00:35 How to work with painful memories; 08:33 Difference between pīti and sukha; 11:06 Style and benefits of your QiGong; 15:51 Awareness of bodily energies and sensations; 23:27 Feeling body from the inside vs. outside; 25:40 Which practices are precursors of satipaṭṭhāna practices; 27:43 How to shift from (uncomfortable) sensation to energy; 30:51 Reflective capacity of citta; 34:51 Mindfulness with pleasant but faint sensation; 36:57 Drowsiness with samādhi.
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-23 Sutta + right view, attitude, mindfulness 62:42
An overview of the Ānāpānasati Sutta, the first three tetrads having to do with samatha – steadying and opening the energies of body and – and the fourth having to do with vipassana – onlooking, contemplating what samatha brings to light. Right view, right attitude, right mindfulness are the guiding factors.
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-22 Guided meditation - Receiving the gift 44:35
Tuning in to ground, space and breathing, send messages of safety and comfort, stillness and ease to your internal environment. What your citta lingers on becomes the dominant theme. This is why it’s possible to experience happiness in this crazy world. Receive the gift of abiding in the simplicity of the given.
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-22 Introduction – Steadying our internal environment 35:18
Our intimate environment shakes us up; we become activated by phenomena and impressions. Through meditation we can begin to undo some of these reflexes, and cultivate a sense of stability and happiness. Then when things go wrong, our internal environment can be ok – it knows how to steady itself and discharge stress.
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
2021-11-22 Anapanasati Text References 0:00
(Recording not available) 
Bodhi College Breathing to Liberation (Ānāpāṇasati)
Attached Files:
  • From Anapanasati Sutta (M118) by Ajahn Sucitto (PDF)
  • Mindfulness, Samadhi and Jhana by Ajahn Sucitto (PDF)
  • Wisdom , Insight and Release by Ajahn Sucitto (PDF)
2021-11-14 Whole system training 38:26
Our practice and training take place in a field that includes the internal and external environments we’re living in. What we can’t do through our willpower we can receive through the different qualities in the environment. Connect it all, then everything will come into balance – there is an intelligence that we haven’t been aware of. You get so far with your own willpower and the rest comes from this source which is beyond that.
Aruna Ratanagiri Buddhist Monastery
2021-11-13 Anger, Grief, Afflictive Emotions 48:17
Anger, grief and fear are primary reflexes that have the potential of taking us back to our safe, sympathetic intimate environment. To the extent that we have lost connection to the capacity of our autonomic nervous system to discharge stress, emotional energies freeze and don’t get resolved. This leave residues that sour and cripple the heart. So we practice cultivating our intimate environment; it's from here we can meet and transmute these afflictive emotions with pure presence.
New York Insight Meditation Center
2021-11-04 Noble Giving Means Giving Oneself 58:18
The quality of dāna, giving, is not dependent on materiality or even a charitable obligation. It’s a Dhamma practice that makes you stronger than you thought you were – it brings up your nobility. It’s a privilege to give because it makes you glad, and so the enlightenment factors arise in the mind. For the one receiving, giving brings forth integrity – one wants to live up to the offering. This is the dāna principle; everybody wins. This dāna is a step on the Path to awakening.
Cittaviveka
2021-10-29 A fruitful merging 59:24
Structures can be helpful, but they only get you so far and then you have to trust something more deeply felt – mindfulness internally and externally, conscience and concern. That’s the ultimate system. The qualities of this spiritual intelligence then blend into something affirmative and potent. We can begin to relax who we think we are, focus instead on these spiritual qualities that merge into the deathless, and allow the unbinding of that fixation of self.
Cittaviveka
2021-10-20 Guided meditation - Troughs, peaks and open stability 53:30
In meditation, one might recognize troughs and peaks with regard to feeling. The idea is to smooth these out so we understand what touches us and how we react. Body and mind work together to create a stable, open presence so we don’t get swept away. Widening, opening, receiving activated energies but not the stories. This is the way you can level out the peaks and troughs.
Cittaviveka Cittaviveka 2021 Rains Retreat - Closing Group Practice
2021-10-20 Returning to the source 41:08
The protocols for cultivation of citta differ from those that operate in the sense world. Step back from the object and notice how it’s affecting you; notice how the subject is being affected. This leads to a purification in terms of engagement with phenomena, and draws away from clinging and passion. From this place of solidity and strength, turn back to the wisdom of your own heart and act from there.
Cittaviveka Cittaviveka 2021 Rains Retreat - Closing Group Practice
2021-10-19 Signs, distorted or uplifting 38:14
In cultivation we’re learning to experience things directly as they really are. We come to understand that we are moved and triggered by signs, not things. A lot of practice is about turning attention away from unskillful signs and cultivating skillful ones – cooperation, generosity, goodness. Then you’ve got something precious that takes you through difficult places and makes you feel comfortable when you’re in a bleak state.
Cittaviveka Cittaviveka 2021 Rains Retreat - Closing Group Practice
2021-10-18 Triggers and leaks 40:11
We are triggered by phenomena, and all kinds of turbulent emotions and reactions can result. But how does it all happen? We use wise attention to investigate the source, where things rise up from. A strong citta needs to be cultivated so you can review how stuff affects you. You have a choice in this: responsiveness or compulsiveness.
Cittaviveka Cittaviveka 2021 Rains Retreat - Closing Group Practice
2021-10-17 Wisdom moves from stillness 36:17
We usually associate change with lots of moving around, but deep change comes through stillness. It’s associated with pleasure – not sense pleasure but heart pleasure. It’s a shift to learn to pause and lift from the engagement. Citta’s qualities come through in this stillness and we can meet what arises with openness and goodwill.
Cittaviveka Cittaviveka 2021 Rains Retreat - Closing Group Practice
2021-10-16 Independence from conditions 46:09
How to meet the problematic nature of conditioned experience without becoming overwhelmed? From a steady heart and mind phenomena can be investigated. We learn what affects us, what is for our welfare and what to let go of. This is how we begin to become independent from conditions: we develop a different center.
Cittaviveka Cittaviveka 2021 Rains Retreat - Closing Group Practice
2021-10-15 Right effort = responsibility with energy 38:56
Energy is a constant fact of life. If you don’t apply it, it gets applied – there’s no neutral place. Be responsible. That’s what right effort means, constantly taking responsibility for where your energy goes. It’s an act of heedfulness and careful attention – choose what you want to abide in.
Cittaviveka Cittaviveka 2021 Rains Retreat - Closing Group Practice
2021-10-14 Web of goodness 36:43
We live in a human context with its mixture of bright and discordant energies. Our individual internal contexts are no different. We cultivate to potentize Dhamma factors for our own benefit and the benefit of the world. Grounding in wholesome qualities and steadiness of body, we find a raft in this very flooded swampy saṁsāra from which we can meet and review the flood of emotions and impulses.
Cittaviveka Cittaviveka 2021 Rains Retreat - Closing Group Practice
2021-10-09 Brahmaviharā Mantra Chant 2:13
Mettā, karuṇā, muditā, upekkhā...
Chicago Theosophical Society :  Brahmavihara Workshop

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