Today Rebecca offered for us the famous guided meditation on Big Mind by Joseph Goldstein, leading step by step to a sense of expanded consciousness. You can click here to engage with it yourself.
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12/21/2014 – Tranquility 1
As we gathered at Joey’s place for a meeting away from the Studio, Same guided our reflections by approaching Tranquility somewhat obliquely with excerpts of talks from Jack Kornfield and another dharma teacher. Links to those talks will be posted here shortly.
As we came together for our second day or reflecting on Joy, Payton phoned to let us know that his car would not start and that he could not make it in to frame the session (though he has sent along the link to the dharma talk by Gil Fronsdal he would have shared).
http://www.audiodharma.org/talks/audio_player/610.html
So those of us gathered on that snowy morning meditated a little longer than usual, and had a rich discussion over tea about the various flavors and functions of Joy in the dharmic path.
Wendy played an insightful talk by Adrianne Ross highlighting many ways that we can find Joy in our meditation, even through persistent pain, struggle, or grief. Adrianne’s talk is here: http://www.audiodharma.org/talks/audio_player/4875.html
Our sitting and discussion was followed by a guided meditation by Than. Bhikkhu that can be found on this site under “Rapture” in “Factors of Awakening”:
http://www.dhammatalks.org/mp3_collections_index.html#strengths
Nancy framed our session today with multiple short talks by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, which focused our attention on skillful ways to discover where energy is needed in our individual meditations, and then finding ways to cultivate those particular energies. Each of his three talks were about 16 minutes long and all can be found on Thanissaro’s website at
Dhammatalks.org
Go to Talks -> Talk Collections (on dropdown Menu) -> Seven factors for Awakening (on the next dropdown Menu). The talks we heard today are (in the order we heard them)
-under The Five Strengths, “Generating Energy”
-under The Seven Factors for Awakening, “Persistence”
-under The Basics, #49 “Wise Effort”
. . . . . . As you can see, there is a wealth of Dhamma to listen to here, a worthy bookmark to be sure.
Payton led our explorations this morning, as for a second time we looked into the Second Factor of Awakening. Usually translated as Investigation, Vicaya was translated as Interest in the talk by James Baraz which anchored the discussion
http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/86/talk/12188/
Baraz spoke of several ways of cultivating increased interest in what can be observed in Mindfulness, including strategies for making a ‘game’ of the process.
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11/9/2014 – Investigation 1
Joey led our reflections this morning, anchoring them in excerpts from a dharma talk by Tara Brach, which experientially explores different approaches to the deep truths that meditation can reveal. For the compete talk, click on
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbaMKK863nI&feature=youtu.be&list=UUE3E-d8dUieqIbKYIO5-pFg
If you have trouble with this link go to http://www.tarabrach.com/audioarchives2014.html and scroll down to 8/27: Loving Truth: The Power of Investigation.
Michael guided our explorations today, which were centered around the teachings of Sayadaw U Tejaniya, the contemporary Burmese meditation master who in the lineage of teaching Vipassana to lay people, begun by Mahasi Sayadaw in the mid 20th century. Instead of focusing on mindfulness of body (kayanupassana – breath, posture, sensations such as hearing, etc.), the focus here is on mindfulness of mind states (cittanupassana), the third foundation of Mindfulness.
A talk by Ashin Tejaniya, translated entirely into English by MaThet, which covers most of the basics of this reorientation can be found at
And the ‘punctuated meditation’ we used, in which Sayadaw dropped reminders into a recent morning meditation at IMS, can be found here – an interesting way to bring the mind back to this new style of Mindfulness.
Free downloadable teachings and books by Ashin Tejaniya can be found at
http://sayadawutejaniya.org/teachings/
A good place to begin might be with the reminder sheet on Right Attitude and the book of conversations with students titled Awareness Alone is Not Enough.
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10/26/2014 – Mindfulness 1
This Sunday we began our series of reflections on the Seven Factors of Awakening, with two sessions to be devoted to each. Margaret initiated the series with a focus on the first factor – Mindfulness – anchoring it in an excerpt of a talk by Joseph Goldstein.
http://dharmaseed.org/teacher/96/talk/1965/
Joseph’s talk explored four aspects of mindfulness
- It does not stray or forget what is right before the mind
- It stands near and guards the senses from getting caught up
- It calls to mind what is skillful and unskillful (moral shame and moral dread)
- It sees things as they are and thus has a close connection to wisdom, utilizing bare attention, clear comprehension to discern suitability of purpose, of timing, of domain of attention, thus guarding against delusion.)
Zen Master Dogen reminds us that “To carry yourself forward and experience the myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening.”
If we can simply be mindful, our engagement with the world will have the startling clarity embodied in the famous haiku by Basho, fresh clear, nothing added:
The old pond
A frog jumps in
Plop.
Today, Wendy hosted our Extended Guided Meditation, beginning with Tara Brach’s guided meditation: Awakening the Heart of Compassion
This was followed by guided walking meditation by Elisabeth Blaikie:
