Dear Friends, Gil is building the progression of effort in practice. The initiating effort gets us going, perhaps again and again. Then we can make choices where we will put the effort – to something helpful or not helpful. Then we develop some level of relaxed persistence, some continuity of practice. Gil describes these as “what we offer”… Read More »
Dear Friends, So far we have explored the energy to get started (initiating effort), the way we can decide where to put our effort (right endeavor), and today, we will review what Gil calls Continuous Effort.https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/11099 As he surmises, the phrase “continuous effort” brings up for me a tightness, a striving, a gotta-get-this-right feeling. And that is quite… Read More »
Dear Friends, The next aspect of viriya that Gil discusses is right endeavor.https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/11093(Gil talks about the word “right” elsewhere: “it’s useful to think of it as meaning ‘appropriate,’ as when we speak of having the ‘right’ tool for a particular task.”) He uses the word “endeavor” as it is “what we are trying to do, what we are… Read More »
Dear Friends, Today, we’ll shift to the next of the faculties – viriya – the effort, energy, spark that gets a person started and continuing on the practice. We all know that doing things can sometimes be hard – it’s hard to get started, it’s hard to keep going. That might be why viriya shows up in so… Read More »
Dear Friends, Over the series of talks, Gil Fronsdal has traced a journey along which our saddha may progress. This journey may be linear, or we may jump around, or we may spiral in ever deepening ways. We started with faith, which inspires us to practice. Then confidence, when we start to value the practice and see the… Read More »
Dear Friends, The fourth dimension of saddha that Gil Fronsdal examines is trust. He talks about trust in the Dharma, which he says comes from a word meaning “to support.” As we practice, … we discover that more is going on within us — processes and patterns of life deeper than anything we could engineer, organize or make… Read More »
Dear Friends, Gil Fronsdal brings out a third aspect of saddha that I hadn’t really considered before, that of conviction.https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/11059 He does note a caution with this word – that there are some people do things out of a sense of conviction without regard to the impact on others. We’ll talk about balancing the faculties more later this… Read More »
Dear Friends, Another common translation for the faculty saddha is “confidence.” Gil Fronsdal describes a nuance of confidence compared to faith: Confidence is different from faith. We can have faith that something is important and useful, but that faith can be at a distance. It’s like we have a treasure and know that we have the treasure, but… Read More »
Dear Friends, In Pali, the first faculty is “saddha” – and that word can be translated many ways. One of the common translations is “faith.” For some folks, the word “faith” is a tricky word. Sharon Salzberg talked about how people responded when she first gave talks on faith: Painful associations with the word faith came pouring out… Read More »
Dear Friends, The inspiration for this month’s topic came from this description of the Five Spiritual Faculties on the Audio Dharma page for the series: [The Buddha] 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… Read More »
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… Read More »
Dear Friends, In the talk Compassion, Karuna, Jill says, “compassion is what flowers when metta, or goodwill, comes into contact with dukkha, with suffering.” Today, we’ll follow Jill’s unpacking of suffering, and then tomorrow look at the how-to of compassion. The term dukkha is often translated as suffering, but it has a much broader sense of the term… Read More »
Dear Friends, In the latter part of DaRa’s talk on The Five Hindrances, she describes 5 aspects of practicing with them, based on an acronym coined by Gill Fronsdal. B.E.L.L.A. Gil describes these steps more fully in this post:https://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/books-articles/hindrances-to-mindfulness-and-clarity/ Gil says, BELLA [is] the Italian word for “beautiful.” When the hindrances are overcome and mindfulness is strong, the… Read More »
Dear Friends, In insight meditation, we often practice cultivating four specific qualities of the heart: kindness (a.k.a. metta, loving kindness, goodwill, friendliness), compassion, joy (particularly joy in the joy of others, a.k.a. mudita), and equanimity (having a balanced perspective). In some circles, my fellow practitioners and I have discussed that this list could include a fifth quality: gratitude.… Read More »
Dear Friends, Closing off this month by finishing up the talk by Kamala Masters titled “The Power of Patience.” I like the way Kamala shows a link between equanimity and patience in this talk. Kamala says that in India, she has heard a colloquial translation of equanimity as “seeing with patience.” I like that description. Patience – to… Read More »
