After sitting and walking in silent meditation, we looked into the role of curiousity in mindfulness. In her article on Mindful.org, Patricia Rockman writes:
We don’t ask “why” when inquiring into our practice because mindfulness is something to be embodied, to be experienced rather than thoug...
In his book, The World Could Be Otherwise, Norman Fischer describes joyful effort, one of the great perfections of the Mahayna Buddhist path. The phrase can seem puzzling; we don't necessarily associate joy with work.
Fischer observes that we can cultivate another way of seeing who we are, like...
Many of us are drawn to meditation as a way to resolve something about our life. Maybe we're looking to be more peaceful, or less angry, or kinder, or a better partner in our relationships. Meditation practice does have much to offer, but it's worth asking: what exactly do we believe needs fixing?
...There is a difference between pain and suffering. One is simply part of being alive, the other is optional. This week, after sitting and walking meditation, we explored the difference and how we can learn to dial down the suffering.
In her blog post on Ten Percent Happier, Sebene Selassie wri...
We listened to a wise podcast by the American teacher Adyashanti about what we're seeking and how our orientation to the search is a big factor how it unfolds. He notes:
And we see that experience changes, and you watch it change. And when you watch it change...there's this intuition that star...
After sitting and walking meditation, we took a deeper dive into the specific practices of meditation, from motivation and posture to taking pleasure and the gradual shifting of attention.
We talked about how we view meditation, whether we can trust that we already have what we are seeking, and al...
After meditation, we took a fresh look at what it means to use our will, using a chapter from Just One Thing, by Rick Hansen writes:
...will...is a context of commitment, as for a mother devoted to the care of her family.Will is giving yourself over to your highest purposes, which lift you and c...
We used VOICE (Voice Of Innate Clarity Exercise) to work with seeking, finding stillness, and the ways they're related. In Ursula Le Guin's translation of the Tao Te Ching, we find these lines in Looking Far:
You don't have to go out the door
to know what goes on in the world.
You don't have to ...
After sitting and walking meditation, we looked into what it means to listen deeply - to ourselves, to others, to the living world around us. We used the four levels of listening proposed by Otto Scharmer, author of Theory U: Learning from the Future as it Emerges:
- Listening from what we alread...
We picked up on the topics of faith and bodhisattvas that we touched on in recent weeks by watching part of a Tara Brach video and then practicing an exercise for cultivating a specific kind of hope. In the talk, Brach notes:
As individuals, each of us, and as communities, when we trust in...