Dear Friends,
For the next few days, I’ll be picking a few tidbits out of a talk by Sally Armstrong on “The roles of mindfulness, metta and equanimity in our practice” from the Equanimity and Awareness retreat.
Sally mentions that it’s helpful to begin with basic teachings and practices of mindfulness. She highlights how mindfulness informs metta (kindness), and how mindfulness and metta inform equanimity (balance). She describes these as a tripod – they bring strength to our practice – to meet different experiences with skill, wisdom, and compassion.
She describes mindfulness as the integration of mind and body. The body is the first foundation of mindfulness in the Satipatthana Sutta. We are trying to steady our attention with gentle, persistent effort – over and over again. Although we are steadying the attention on the body, to start, Sally reminds us:
It’s the mind we’re training. The mind and body are not separate – they both influence and echo each other, reflect each other. As we get to know the body, we’re also understanding the mind, and vice versa.
— Sally Armstrong
Guided meditation: As part of the first day of the retreat, Kamala Masters led a simple mindfulness meditation.
https://sr.dharmaseed.org/teacher/99/talk/50001/
The first 10 minutes has basic meditation instruction, then there’s about 30 minutes of silence – so you can set a timer for when you want to finish. The last bit of the recording has retreat logistics and the “cellphone renunciation ceremony”, so you could skip that part.
Reflection: Sally’s talk includes some reflections on how technology can connect us in many wonderful ways, but also how it can be a way of getting lost and disconnected from ourselves. What’s your relationship to technology? How do you balance the many good aspects of technology with the many mindless and addictive aspects? (As an IT geek, this is one I really have to work on.)
Feel free to share your reflections or comments with all of us here, below. (It’s more fun if we share this together!)
With warm wishes,
Andrea
You gain m much merit from helping us, Andrea. Thank you.
Thank you Darren. I’m glad you’re part of this!
Technology presents the most critical paradox of the current moment. With our fragmented sense of self we kaleidoscope our identities across vast tracts of cyberspace. We become vast but our sense of true self becomes infinitesimally small. That being said, the dharma, which to me means all the knowledge of truth that exists and that can be understood, is coming to me instantly and powerfully through bits and bytes. This type of meaningful interaction would not have been possible thirty years ago. We would be mailing letters or meeting once a month or sharing books. The awakening is a quickening – remains to be seen what is being born.