Q1 How can we reconcile joy and dispassion? How are nipita and virago supposed to feel? 11:55 Q2 Are the 16 steps of vipassana meditation the result of calmness meditation, or is it a wise directing of attention as a goal? 17:59 Q3 You mentioned to notice the space between the in and out breath and the out and in breath. When I do that my breath seems to get more shallow and I feel a threat and start coughing. 22:32 Q4 Something seems to keep kicking in the breathing process. What should I do? 23:18 Q5 How to be less demanding, to maintain the highest quality to do well, but less demanding, e.g of expectations of others?

As we head into the darkest period of the year we are processing dark forces of ignorance and hate in the news each day. The light and loving awareness can hold all the forces of ignorance-- both inside us and around us--with compassionate understanding This is a time to remember all that is good.

We continue with the exploration opened up last week in our examination of "skillful desire," starting again with the common misunderstanding of the Buddha's teachings as suggesting giving up all wanting of the pleasant and all not wanting of the unpleasant. There are, to be sure, some passages in the teachings which seem to suggest this approach; here is one example, from the Sallatha Sutta about the results of practice: “Desirable things don't charm the mind, undesirable ones bring no resistance." In the talk, we first review the nature of skillful desire and the distinction between skillful and unskillful desire. A starting reference point is the understanding of the sequence from contact to grasping in the teaching on Dependent Origination and. We look again at the Buddha's teachings on chanda or "skillful desire" and the importance of experiences of pleasure, joy, and happiness in different practice contexts. We then look in a similar way at skillful aversion, asking about the distinction between skillful and unskillful aversion, and pointing especially to the importance of inquiry into the experience of aversion; we look with some detail into the experience of anger. Finally, we connect our explorations with the experience of darkness and light at the time of the Winter Solstice, four days from now.

We start with settling for about 8 minutes followed by about the same time with basic mindfulness practice. Then we explore "moderate" experiences of pleasant or unpleasant when they occur, whether a bodily experience, an emotion, or a thought (or a mix), experiencing pleasant or unpleasant and seeing whether there follows wanting (or not wanting) and reactivity (habitual grasping or pushing away). We close with some reflection on what we explored, with an emphasis on skillful aversion: Was some of the not wanting skillful? Unskillful? What do we find in some daily life examples of aversion? This exploration is related to the talk given a short time later.