The Buddha often described our practice in terms of untangling the tangles we find ourselves caught in. Together, let us uncover the primary tangles we get tangled in and how we can use our Buddhist practices to become free from these tangles.
“A tangle within,
a tangle without,
people are entangled in a tangle.
Gotama, I ask you this: who can untangle this tangle?….”
-Jata Sutta
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Not all stress is bad. Yet without mindful awareness, anticipatory stress may spiral into reactivity, paralyzing fear and suffering. How do we meet this stress mindfully, use it skilfully, then let go?
This week’s theme is “Nurturing a Long View and Living Now”. It takes a lot of heart and presence to live a satisfying and meaningful life. Our inner patterns of resistance and reactivity often make us short sighted and contracted, and yet we have the potential to live from a timeless presence and embody beautiful human qualities such as wisdom, care, passion and originality. How can you make your time on earth something beautiful to behold? How can you live now with zest, courage, and love? How can you be a good ancestor for the ones that will live 100,000 years from now?
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In this session we explore more precisely the different individuals we think we are through the days. We will try to recognize them better, with their own feelings, sensations, emotions, thoughts and states of mind. We’ll also try to hear more clearly all the different judgemental voices that take place in us, about the way…
This week’s topic is “Rediscovering Simplicity: Renunciation and the Art of Letting Go”. Renunciation is one of the ten paramis or ‘spiritual perfections’ considered most conducive to happiness and wellbeing, and yet we tend to understand it in ways that are not helpful. How in the age of peak stuff and peak busyness can we recover the wisdom of “less is more” in a way that re-energises us, lightens our burdens and helps us rediscover creativity and flow? This week we’ll look at this question from different angles with some suggestions for taking the exploration from our morning practice into the activities of our day.
Recorded :
Eros is life force, the energy that animates our being. Eros fills our spiritual life with vitality, our minds with creativity, our ideas with embodiment and our relating with rich intimacy. To live full lives we need access to eros; without it we become dry, rigid, flacid and withholding. Yet what place does it have…
This week’s topic is: Beginning to See More Possibilities.
The Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki, said: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” With a beginner’s possibilities we can release our heart’s wholesome aspirations. Let’s engender a beginners spirit, and manifest our innate potential for freedom and well-being: embodying a saint’s patience to start again; an adventurer’s openness to step out of constricted views; and a creative’s zeal to reimagine ourselves and our world”
This week’s topic is “Getting A Feel For Feeling”. As we perceive, we add a feeling (vedanā) to our experience. When we are unaware of this process and react to the projected feeling, it causes unnecessary suffering (dukkha). However, understanding this process and responding skilfully leads to one of the deepest senses of freedom available. Let’s explore this freedom through our daily meditations this week.
Recorded :
The fires and floods of this summer, and the ongoing pandemic and its complexities, can weigh heavy on the heart, along with the shocking but unsurprising new IPCC report confirming the ‘inevitable and irreversible’ worsening effects of the climate disruption, ecological collapse and existential emergency we are already living through. This class, led by Sangha…
Discussion