Archive of Talks

Although Westerners often begin their engagement with Buddhism with items listed at the end of the Eightfold Path – Mindfulness and Concentration – the Buddha put Right View and Right Intention at the beginning, and considered them foundational. Wendy guided our reflections this week, using portions of a dharma talk by Sally Clough Armstrong to… Read more

Payton led the discussion centered around the idea of Papancha, or Mental Proliferation. The seminal sutta on this topic is the “Honeyball Sutta”, where it’s explained as: first there is the coming together of three things, an object, a sensory organ, and consciousness. The meeting of these three is “contact”. Contact leads to feeling tone (Vedana),… Read more

Zac guided us through multiple avenues of reflection on vedana or the feeling tone of our experiences…pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. Recognizing these dispositions as they arise and breaking off the automatic clinging or rejecting or ignoring can help us step out of a downward spiral. Read more

Payton guided the discussion this morning on the concept of Doubt in our practice. Typically Doubt is expressed as one of the Hinderances, but in a talk by Tony Bernhard we heard that doubting is only natural, and perhaps more important is our understanding of what we decide to believe. To listen to Tony’s talk,… Read more

Wendy Guided our reflections this morning, anchoring the discussion in Tara Brach’s talk “Freedom from Addiction.”  As Brach sees it, Addiction is a version of the Tanha or Thirst or Craving that the Buddha identified as the cause of suffering in the Second Noble Truth.  We reflected on addictions from email checking to substance abuse,… Read more

As our sangha met for the first time in our new location in the Lojong Space, Payton guided our reflections on Sangha, the sense of community that spreads from those seriously committed to the Buddhist path out to include all those we interact with, and finally to a sense of connection with the population of the… Read more