Episodes
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It’s helpful every so often to ask ourselves what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. What habits are we reinforcing and what kind of life are we building for ourselves? What it is that we’re 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 Buddha’s teachings encourage us to hold our practice lightly. To apply what we’ve 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 we’re 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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Missing episodes?
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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.
They’re capacities that already exist in us. By cultivating them, we’re 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. It’s 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 don’t want to acknowledge, even to ourselves. If you ever notice yourself reacting or becoming lost in rumination, there’s 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 we’re not trying to rise above the raw and messy. We’re not trying to transcend our humanness. We’re 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. There’s 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 it’s just part of the flow of experience.
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The Pali word ‘saddhā’ is often translated as ‘faith’, but a better translation might be ‘trust’ or ‘confidence’.
Saddhā conveys a willingness to engage in and commit to practice. There’s no need for belief in a higher power or a deity because saddhā 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, we’re 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. We’re more likely to be misled by feelings if we’re 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 we’re distracted. Sometimes when we have difficulty concentrating, we’re simply unwilling to accept what’s happening right now. What’s really going on is avoidance.
By sensing into the energy in the body, we’re tuning in to the present moment. We’re saying ‘this is what’s happening, right now, and it’s fine’.
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As humans we have a natural negativity bias. We’re 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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We’re not meditating so that we can rise above all that’s wrong in the world. Sometimes we have to engage with it. Sometimes we have to speak out against what’s 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 isn’t necessarily considered a compliment, but it’s a big deal in early Buddhist teachings.
There’s 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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Your habits aren’t who you are. When you notice yourself reacting to something, it’s just a pattern, a movement of energy. It’s not who you are, it’s a fleeting reaction. One minute it’s there, the next it’s gone. You don’t have to identify with it.
To see that is to be free.
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Our need for security shapes the way we live. Most of us take refuge in our own home, our possessions, our bank account and there’s nothing wrong with that. We can mostly rely on our home to keep us warm and comfortable, our car to get us where we want to go, but we can’t rely on these things for more than that.
They’re not going to offer us lasting peace and happiness. They’re not going to make us feel complete. If we put unrealistic expectations on anything, we’ll be disappointed.
This talk was offered to Insight North East in March 2024
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If you notice that you’re lost in repetitive thinking, it’s not a bad thing at all. It’s a perfect opportunity to learn and grow. The instruction is simply to recognise, without judgment, what’s happening: ‘This agitation has arisen and, like everything, it’ll pass’.
And gradually, it loses its grip.
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