Dear Friends, Continuing with Jill’s talk on Compassion, Karuna, today we turn the ways to practice compassion, what sort of obstacles might arise, and how to work with them. One of the ways we can practice developing compassion is through the repetition of phrases. Jill give us her four phrases, and explains what each phrase means for her.… 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, There have been times, when I’ve mentioned to friends or co-workers that I practice meditation and mindfulness, that I get the reply, “Oh, I could never do that – I can never stop thinking.” Jill addresses some of misconceptions we might have about thinking and meditation in the talk Mindfulness of the Mind. Many meditation instructions,… Read More »
Dear Friends, In the next recording, Jill brings in reflections on feeling tone, vedana. Feeling tone arises when a sense organ makes contact with an object. Light waves bouncing off an object meet the eye – and sight arises – and also a flavour to that contact – pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant or unpleasant (simplified as neutral).… Read More »
Dear Friends, Continuing today with the talk on “The Brahma Viharas for Insight and Wisdom,” this time sharing some of Jill’s imagery when talking about the the many ways a kind heart can be expressed and respond wisely in the world. As Jill mentions, through our meditation practice, we can use a range of techniques to help make… Read More »
Dear Friends, In the third talk from the retreat, “The Brahma Viharas for Insight and Wisdom,” Jill brings in lots of ideas to unpack – so I’ll take a couple of days to bring out a few points I found helpful. Jill starts off by explaining two extremes we might notice in our own lives – one of… Read More »
Dear Friends, In the first recording from the retreat I’m using for inspiration this month, Jill Shepherd provides some general background that can create a useful context for the rest of our month together. The style the approach to meditation that we’re doing here is insight meditation or vipassana. Just as a very simple beginning definition of what… Read More »
Dear Friends, With the prospect of strong winds and snow across much of Saskatchewan over the next day or two, there’s a good chance things here will look a bit like a snow globe that has been shaken up. We won’t be able to see the buildings or trees clearly as the snow is whipped up and swirled… Read More »
Dear Friends, Diana Winston wrote: Your body is the doorway to mindfulness. As you may have noticed by now, your mind can be anywhere at any time…. Your body, by contrast, is always in the present moment, so brining attention to it brings you automatically into the present. The task is to turn your attention to this reality,… Read More »
Dear Friends, Continuing with Sally Armstrong’s talk, “Facets of Equanimity,” looking at some of the ways equanimity might be experienced in our meditation practice. She states, “Any moment of true or clear mindfulness has equanimity in it.” You can hear this balance of equanimity in the definitions of mindfulness Sally shares. Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of… Read More »
Dear Friends, Continuing with Kamala’s talk, “The Five Spiritual Faculties’ relationship to Equanimity,” and the third faculty of mindful awareness. Kamala reminds us that sati, the word often translated as “mindfulness” has as it root an aspect of memory – of remembering to be mindful. She calls it a “powerful” mindfulness because it’s the type of present moment… Read More »
Dear Friends, As we enter into the fourth week of our daily emails, our focus now moves to the fourth way of establishing mindfulness, mindfulness of dhammas, which can be translated as mindfulness of phenomena or “stuff”. As Mark Coleman explains in a lecture from Essential Buddhist Teachings, The other three [ways of establishing mindfulness] – we were… Read More »
Dear Friends, We will spend the next few days looking at the third way of establishing mindfulness – mindfulness of mind. In Chapter 8 of The Four Foundations of Mindfulness in Plain English, Bhante Gunaratana first explores the nature of mind and consciousness. First a side-note: “mind” in this context is a translation of the Pali word citta, and it… Read More »
Dear Friends, We’ve spent 10 days looking at the first way of establishing mindfulness – mindfulness of the body – including mindfulness of breathing, body postures, actions of body, speech and mind, body parts, elemental qualities, and the changing, impermanent nature of our bodies. The second foundation of mindfulness is often called mindfulness of feelings. In English, the… Read More »
Dear Friends, We are about to start another month-long exploration of ways to support a daily meditation practice. I’m so honored to have you as part of this community. The theme we will be exploring this month is the four ways of establishing mindfulness – mindfulness of the body, of feelings, of the mind, and of phenomena themselves.… Read More »
