Episodios
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A great deal of our mental bandwidth is taken up with craving. We donât recognise how much it organises our lives. It externalises happiness and makes us perpetually restless, a hostage to conditions.
One skilful way of responding to craving when it arises is simply to bring it into awareness. We can then start to question it and understand it better.
This is a recording of a talk for Insight North East from May 2024.
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Our inner struggles often go on longer than they need to, but eventually they fade. Like everything, theyâre impermanent.
Our clinging and reacting canât be sustained indefinitely. The ability to notice that, to watch our reactivity fade, is a powerful practice. We canât always observe it arising because weâre too caught up in it, but we can notice its fading.
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According to the Therigatha, the verses of the elder nuns, the Buddha showed concern and respect for women when no-one else did.
Since then, Buddhist lineages have tended to view men as being spiritually superior to women. Masculine energies and modes of practice have taken precedence over feminine ones. Despite this, many people are now actively working for change and exploring how they can restore the balance.
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Itâs helpful every so often to ask ourselves what weâre doing and why weâre doing it. What habits are we reinforcing and what kind of life are we building for ourselves? What it is that weâre cultivating? And if we have a spiritual practice of any kind, maybe to ask ourselves whether that practice is helping us to respond to our world more skilfully.
The Buddhaâs teachings encourage us to hold our practice lightly. To apply what weâve learned in a practical way, not to encumber ourselves with it.
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Often the path requires us to embrace apparent contradictions. Some of our practice has to be understood from different perspectives, depending on how weâre going to apply it.
Training ourselves to stay with the opposites helps us keep our minds pliable and open. It counteracts our tendency to fit everything we hear into our existing world view.
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One way to practise fearlessness and a more open, receptive relationship with our world is through the Brahmaviharas, also known as the heart practices. These four qualities of friendliness, compassion, joy, and equanimity describe our potential for emotional and psychological freedom.
Theyâre capacities that already exist in us. By cultivating them, weâre making them our natural home.
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The Buddha's disciple Ananda appears throughout the early scriptures as someone who was faithful, humble and above all, human. In many ways, he wasn't the perfect monk. There are occasions when his sensitivity and his expressions of grief seem at odds with the Buddha's teachings on non-attachment and impermanence.
His honesty makes him an excellent role model. Itâs easy to get uptight and self-absorbed about our practice. If we can be completely honest about our imperfection, our complete lack of enlightenment, the times when we lose our equilibrium and the times when sadness overwhelms us, then we open up to being fully alive.
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There are parts of ourselves that we choose not to share with the world, patterns and beliefs that we donât want to acknowledge, even to ourselves. If you ever notice yourself reacting or becoming lost in rumination, thereâs an opportunity to learn about yourself.
It might be time to shift your attention from the outside world back inside.
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In our meditation practice weâre not trying to rise above the raw and messy. Weâre not trying to transcend our humanness. Weâre practising opening to our tenderness, our vulnerability, our sensitivity, our insubstantial nature.
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Our experience of body and mind is constantly changing. That means our sense of self keeps changing. Thereâs nothing solid to hang on to.
Our need for security means we spend a lot of time and energy trying to hang on anyway, and that clinging generates a lot of our suffering and dissatisfaction.
With practice, we start to see just how insubstantial the sense of self really is. We see that itâs just part of the flow of experience.
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The Pali word âsaddhÄâ is often translated as âfaithâ, but a better translation might be âtrustâ or âconfidenceâ.
SaddhÄ conveys a willingness to engage in and commit to practice. Thereâs no need for belief in a higher power or a deity because saddhÄ is grounded in direct personal experience.
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Just as we can bring mindfulness to the body in stillness, we can bring it to the body in movement. With movement meditation, weâre practising away from the traditional mode of just sitting still.
Feelings in the body and feelings in the mind are intimately connected. Awareness of one supports awareness of the other. Movement in one supports movement in the other.
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Whatever feelings we refuse to accept will simply keep agitating us until we accept them.
Purification happens when we stop, listen to the body and allow feelings to be just as they are. If we keep doing that, over and over again, the habits of reactivity and clinging are gradually eradicated.
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One of the reasons we practise meditation is to train ourselves to handle all of the ups and downs, from the smallest irritations to the greatest sorrows in our lives.
The teachings on the seven factors of awakening, which can be seen as a map of the territory, describe a series of steps that lead us to a place of steadiness and resilience.
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The unconscious mind is incredibly powerful. It has the capacity to process information more quickly and more efficiently than our conscious mind. But it can be prone to errors and biases.
Emotional resistance clouds our intuitive wisdom. Weâre more likely to be misled by feelings if weâre putting a lot of energy into our sense of self.
Knowing a little about how the mind works helps us to see more clearly.
This is a recording of a talk given to Insight North East in June 24.
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When we meditate, we find out things about ourselves, like how easily weâre distracted. Sometimes when we have difficulty concentrating, weâre simply unwilling to accept whatâs happening right now. Whatâs really going on is avoidance.
By sensing into the energy in the body, weâre tuning in to the present moment. Weâre saying âthis is whatâs happening, right now, and itâs fineâ.
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As humans we have a natural negativity bias. Weâre acutely sensitive to things that upset or trouble us.
Our capacity for gratitude and appreciation counteracts this. Acknowledging the good in our lives supports our sense of wellbeing and makes us less prone to depression.
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Expecting pleasant feelings to remain stable means fighting against reality. Everything that arises passes; feelings change, often within a few seconds.
And yet still we react and cling as though our lives depend on it.
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Weâre not meditating so that we can rise above all thatâs wrong in the world. Sometimes we have to engage with it. Sometimes we have to speak out against whatâs unjust, and not from a place of hate and anger, but with openness and compassion.
This is the challenge of our lives.
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In our culture, saying someone is harmless isnât necessarily considered a compliment, but itâs a big deal in early Buddhist teachings.
Thereâs a protective quality to the teachings on goodwill and non-harming. Harming other beings harms us, just as helping others helps us. The consequences of our karma, in other words our actions, can be long term.
This talk was offered to Insight North East in April 2024
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