Archive of Talks

  • Patterns of Becoming

    This Sunday Joey played a talk by Guy Armstrong entitled “Patterns of Becoming: The end of Karma”.From the talk description: “The fifth and last in a series of talks discusses the troublesome patterns of mind and volitional action that we identify as self, and how we can step out of them with the tools of dharma… Read more

  • Easing into the Boundless

    This past Sunday,  Sam guided our reflection and played a talk by Brian Lesage titled “Easing into the Boundless”. The talk is available on Dharmaseed here: http://dharmaseed.org/talks/audio_player/484/33161.html Read more

  • Mindfulness vs. Concentration

    This Sunday Mike guided the group through a comparison and contrast of Mindfulness and Concentration. Underlying this topic was a talk given by Gil Fronsdal. The talk is here: http://audiodharma.org/talks/audio_player/910.html Gil says: Mindfulness is a clear knowing of what’s going on Concentration is a deep focus on what’s going on …but that’s it’s not quite that… Read more

  • Right Effort and Right Concentration

    This Sunday Rebecca led the discussion reading from Joseph Goldstein’s book, Mindfulness, focusing on Right Effort and Right Concentration as steps of the Eightfold Path. There was quite an exploration of the four classic pieces of Right Effort: to prevent the arising of unarisen unwholesome states; to abandon unwholesome states that have already arisen; to… Read more

  • Why do we Meditate?

    Today Payton led a discussion on the rather complicated topic of “Why do we meditate?” after playing a talk given by Ren Bunce, which is available here: http://www.audiodharma.org/talks/audio_player/3093.html Ren spoke about her personal experience coming to practice, starting with Alcoholics Anonymous. She heard the teaching to love everyone, but was confused about “How?”. It was only… Read more

  • The Progress of Insight

    This past Sunday, Zac guided our reflection using the Progress of Insight framework. This “map of the journey” comes to us from various traditional Theravada Buddhist commentary texts, most notably Buddhagosa’s Visuddhimagga (430 CE). This framework outlines insights, stages, and particular challenges that a practitioner of vipassanā (“insight”, “clear-seeing”) meditation is said to pass through… Read more