Developing the five faculties in January 2023

Dear friends,

I will be offering daily meditation emails again for January 2023. Are you interested in participating?

Similar to previous years, I’ll send out an email each day in January, with a short bit of encouragement in the form of a practice, idea, reflection, poem, or song.

This year, I’ll explore the theme of the five spiritual faculties. As Gil Fronsdal describes them:

The Buddha was very pragmatic. He didn’t philosophize about “the nature of reality”; he gave us simple, basic guidelines about how we can manage the challenges and difficulties of life. The Buddha started with the basic human condition: we often suffer. Suffering can take many forms: anxiety, tension, stress, grief, fear, or dissatisfaction, to name a few. He emphasized that suffering is workable, that we can engage with our suffering in such a way as to be freed from it. He described five faculties that we need to develop to do so: confidence (faith), effort, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment (wisdom). These five qualities are present in varying degrees in almost every activity. They are useful in developing any skill, be it playing a musical instrument, training in a sport, or cultivating a meditative mind. The Buddha recognized these universal human capacities and taught us how to use them to develop the craft of meditation.

https://www.audiodharma.org/series/1726

If this interests you, please click this link to subscribe or send me an email:
http://www.grzesina.net/lists/?p=subscribe&id=1
(be sure to check the box for “Daily meditation – January 2023”)

You can also get updates direct from the blog (RSS feed or use the “Subscribe to get blog updates by email” tool on the side bar or bottom of the page).

I am open to offering some online meditation sessions again – both typical meditation as well as social meditation practices. If you would be interested in participating in this, could you fill in this quick survey, so I get a sense of what times and practices might be of interest for you? I’ll set up a schedule and have something posted to the website by the end of December.

It is my hope that these daily messages and occasional live meditations will be a supportive tool in helping you maintain or develop a daily mindfulness practice.

With best wishes,
Andrea