Vegan. Digital craftsman. Tea explorer. Avid learner of things. Writes code @automattic.
Distraction – a fresh approach – was our topic this past Sunday as we met for our monthly in-person gathering. Michel guided our reflections, drawing upon on the Non-Dual tradition exemplified by John Astin’s teachings and guided meditations for a fresh and revealing perspective to the question of the meaning and value of distraction in meditation and ordinary living.
Patience is one of the ten paramis, or perfections of character. Patience is also something lacking in our society. Symptoms of impatience include same day delivery on everything and the expectation that everybody will instantly reply to our messages. Patience is a powerful antidote to negative emotions, including anger.
Jeff facilitated this week’s exploration of patience. We listend to a recent talk from Jill Shepherd titled, “The parami of patience” which was given as part of a series of talks on the ten paramis. Patience is a quality that is undervalued in mainstream society with its emphasis on instant gratification, but in the Buddha’s teachings, it’s seen as the foremost of all the paramis. Fortunately, it’s something that we can be trained in, initially by recognizing where we’re impatient, then making the effort to orient to steadiness and non-resistance.
You can listen to Jill’s talk here: https://dharmaseed.org/talks/77350/
NOTES:
Patience is a topic near and dear to my heart. Patience, or lack thereof, was one of my entry points onto the Buddhist path. One the first Buddhist books that I read was “Healing Anger” by The Dalai Lama. The subtitle reads as follows: the power of patience from a Buddhist perspective. By developing patience I was able to lessen my own suffering and the suffering I contributed to those around me.
As with most spiritual growth, patience is tested and developed during difficulties. It is easy to be patient when everything is going smoothly. Difficult people and difficult situations are where patience becomes more important and also more challenging. The practice of sitting mediation is part of the training in patience, but we need to also choose patience in other situations.
A few quotes about patience:
Patience is the calm acceptance that things can happen in a different order than the one you have in mind.
Patience is not the ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting.
Patience entails cultivating skillful courageousness, mindfulness, and tolerance.
If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape 100 days of sorrow.
Three types of patience
• patience with difficult people
• patience with hardships on the path
• patience with the ups and downs of life
Patience is one of the ten paramis, and is often linked to others, such as energy. This reminds us that we need to develop a breadth of skills and also a depth of each skill.
In the beauty and poignancy of spring we can become deeply aware of the beauty of the changes around us. Can we take in this beauty in a way that helps us accept the natural changes of our mind-body and the mind-bodies around us as another deeply beautiful process? One that could bring us to a place of peace and understanding? What habits might prevent us from doing this? What lovely qualities would support this aspiration?
Christina Feldman defines Dukkha as vulnerability and also as a moment of standing at a crossroads. We can choose to follow our habits and find ourselves again and again in a familiar place of distress or we can choose to follow a path that “is actually concerned with cultivating the lovely…” One of these “lovely qualities” is joy (Piti), such as joy in the beauty of nature and its changes.
Darryl guided our reflections this Sunday as we listened to and discussed excerpts from two Christina Feldman talks (including words from Chris Cullen).
You can listen to the talks here:
In the Buddha’s opinion, the practice of gratitude and generosity, while not always easy, is “beautiful in the beginning, beautiful in the middle, and beautiful in the end.” The variety of forms that gratitude takes can be remarkable. Giving to a charity or to a person on the street may be what first come to mind. But what about relating clearly to the present moment – giving it our full attention, and suddenly seeing it (and everyone in it) quite differently. Letting go of a firmly held idea can be a powerful form of generosity to the larger situation.
This week, Eveline guided our discussion of the ways in which practicing any form of generosity brings the mind into a happy, open, receptive place from which to begin again, refreshed. A talk by Jaya Rudgard, who teaches at IMS and Spirit Rock, served as a further source of insights for our discussion.
A link to the talk is forthcoming.
Meditation offers us many benefits, and at the top of the list are Wisdom and Energy. Wisdom may come in small increments or spectacular insights. But in either case it requires sustained energy. Wisdom may reveal to us that energy is finite and fluctuant, and needs to be shepherded carefully and cultivated with patience and sensitivity to our changing situation and sensitivity. Don guided our reflections in this month’s in-person sit using a talk by Jill Shepard.
You can listen to Jill’s talk here:
Forgiveness is not a parami or a brahma-vihara. However, forgiveness is an important skill for us to develop along the Buddha’s path. Forgiveness requires love, compassion, joy and equanimity. As part of the human experience we will naturally be hurt and hurt others. If we cannot forgive others or cannot forgive ourselves, our suffering will only continue the cycle of harm. Forgiveness offers a path to freedom from this cycle.
This week, Jeff shared a talk given this year by Tara Brach titled “The RAIN of Forgiveness,” in which she moves beyond inviting us to forgive and lays out mindfulness-based tool to heal and free our hearts: RAIN (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture).
You can listen to the talk here: https://dharmaseed.org/talks/76321/
Eveline guided our reflections this Sunday, exploring how we can learn a lot about being equanimous by investigating our interbeing with the earth.
The Buddha often remarked that the earth accommodates everything that happens to it without reactivity: it is whole and equanimous. We often feel we need to find our way back to the earth, when really we have never been separated from it, as the wave is never separate from the ocean.
If we want a peaceful world, we need to be peaceful people—to find inner quiet, with a heart as wide as the world.
In honor of Earth Day, we explored these the deep, intimate, and expansive connections, drawing from Eveline’s framing perspective, excerpts from a talk by Howard Cohn, and our own shared inquiry.
You can listen to Howard’s talk here: https://dharmaseed.org/talks/53452/
Earth Poem by Bhaswat Chakraborty: https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/earth-40/
If we look at the stories that make up most of our mental chatter, we come to see that even if they seem to range broadly, they are mostly in fact about ourselves, and actually help to create and the sense of self. This phenomenon, called mana papanca (mental proliferation around the sense of self), and is the subject of a talk by Christina Feldman, excerpts of which was be offered for discussion as Sam guided our reflections at this week’s sangha.
A link to the talk is forthcoming.
We reflected this week on the instructions that the Buddha gave to Bahiya about what is sometimes called bare attention, or sometimes mindfulness: “In the seen, let there be just the seen, in the heard let there be just the heard”, and so on. These ostensibly simple instructions are at the heart of the practice, and worth aspiring to implement, although doing that is not quite so simple. Margaret guided our reflections, drawing on the teachings of Sally Armstrong and others to explore this theme.
You can listen to Sally’s talk here:
https://dharmaseed.org/talks/player/73215.html
You can read a translation of the teaching to Bahiya here:
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/ud/ud.1.10.than.html
Also read was this excerpt from the Malunkyaputta Sutta:
When we study a natural phenomenon or a discipline, we usually seek to accumulate knowledge, hoping to find wisdom that will help us to grasp the situation clearly. With meditation, the approach may sometimes be reversed: we may seek to shed old ways of seeing, and genuinely attempt to not-know. Eric guided our reflections this Sunday, with the help of excerpts from Stephen Batchelor’s bringing to light his work in Korean Zen, and guiding us into the heart of Not-Knowing, freshly asking of whatever we may encounter, “What is this?”
You can listen to Stephen’s talk here:
