Use code SUMMERPRACTICE for a 25% discount on all On Demand Courses through August 31.

Meditating and speaking: simultaneously practicing Sila, Samadhi and Panna

With Gregory Kramer recorded on February 11, 2018.

Found our teachings useful? Help us continue our work and support your teachers with a donation. Here’s how.

The communicative loop of listening and speaking forms a powerful karmic workshop. Language taps into our karmic archive, sankhara. It reaches other people and, if they are listening, there is mind-to-mind contact. Relational contact is intrinsically powerful because humans are intrinsically relational: when we engage together, our mutual responsiveness amplifies our efforts. Speaking and listening together empowers us to do good works, or drives us towards anger and fear. Sila. It empowers our development of mindfulness and calm concentration, or it is a channel for distraction. Samadhi. It carries wisdom and deep inquiry or driveling trivia. Panna. All of these are enfolded in meditation in which the doorway to speech is opened.

Listen to the audio version below, or click here to download the mp3.

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Lama Rod Owens

    The Dharma of Homecoming in Times of Fear

    Maya Angelou once wrote: “The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” James Baldwin reflected: “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” In The Wiz, Stephanie Mills sang: “When I think of home I think of…

    Read More

  • Mark Coleman Profile Photo

    Nature as Dharma, Nature as Refuge

    In this session we will explore how the natural world is not only a place to develop resilience in stressful times but also a profound source of wisdom, joy and equanimity, which are essential qualities that can nourish us when the world around us is in upheaval. We will draw on qualities of the earth…

    Read More

  • Willa Blythe Baker

    Loving Awareness: Finding Freedom Within

    “This thing person called “me”, the one who is sensing, thinking and perceiving right now….who or what is it? This is an age old question that the traditions of the East, especially Buddhism and Hinduism, have held as the heart of their traditions. The answer to that question, in some scriptures, is “awareness”, a part of us that is already wakeful, attentive, open, free and loving. In this Sunday teaching, we consider what it means to encounter awareness, and why it might be important, not only for our practice of meditation, but for the fulfilment of our life’s purpose.

    Read More

  • Uncertainty, Stability & Love: Everything Comes With Everything

    Life is never only good or only bad, pleasant or unpleasant, comfortable or uncomfortable, just or unjust. Cultivating a wide spacious perspective within the reality of uncertainty gives rise to a bigger capacity to meet our lives more gently, kindly, and clearly, with more stability and more love. Join us as we explore perspectives and practices to…

    Read More

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Ulla Koenig – Week of Sept 12, 2022

    This week’s topic is (Be)Come As You Are. Our driven-ness, our ruminating thoughts, and our feelings of shame, guilt, and anxiety never allow us to simply ‘be’. They evolve around a sense of identity , a process the Buddha called selfing (bhava), a form of suffering (dukkha). We are endlessly trapped in a narrative of who we think we ought to be, were in the past and should be in the future.

    We will dedicate our shared time together to build an awareness of these processes and find alternative ways to relate to the many experiences of life.

    Read More