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Dharma Talks
given at Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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2021-11-22
Gratitude and Generosity Meditation | Monday Night
27:23
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Jack Kornfield
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Like the waves of the ocean, the breath rises and falls. Bring loving awareness to the breath.
Shift your attention from the breath to all the sensations in your body. With mindful loving awareness, notice the whole field of sensations. If there are areas of pain or stiffness, bow to them and hold them with kindness. Hold them as you would a child who is going through a hard time. Notice how this kind loving awareness allows for the tension and knots to soften in their own way.
Now as an expression of gratitude, say thank you to your own body for caring so much, for holding so much as you move through the days and nights. Tell your body, “I’m ok just now—you can relax. You can rest.”
Now bring your attention to your heart that carries so much. Notice all that your heart has been holding: longings, fear, love, worry, frustration, excitement, sadness, appreciation, doubt, deep love. Say thank you to your heart for caring so much, for trying to help and protect you. Tell your heart, “I’m ok just now—you can relax. You can rest.” Let your heart be at ease.
Now bring your attention to your mind that produces a stream of thoughts, images, pictures, plans, memories, ideas. Feel the energy of the mind, creative, sometimes obsessed, analyzing, exploring, opening. Say thank you for working so hard to take care of you, to protect you. Tell your mind, “I’m ok just now—you can relax. You can rest.”
Notice that you’re not your body, feelings, thoughts. You are the loving witness, you are consciousness itself. You are the loving awareness that acknowledges the body, heart and mind. Relax into loving awareness. You are the silent, vast witness to it all.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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Monday and Wednesday Talks
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2021-11-17
Doorways to Awakening
66:22
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Donald Rothberg
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Remembering the teaching about there being 84,000 "Dharma Doors," we explore a number of such "doorways to awakening." The interest is especially in inviting us each to have a sense of what at the current time brings one's practice alive, identifying one's "edge of current learning." This may be to identify a current challenge or difficulty and approach it as part of one's practice, and/or to emphasize a dimension of formal and/or informal practice that brings interest, joy, and aliveness.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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Monday and Wednesday Talks
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2021-11-07
Introduction to Awakened Awareness
63:37
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Donald Rothberg
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In concentration practice and insight practice, some of the structures of ordinary experience are deconstructed, including the separation of knower and known, the solidity of the object, and the will (which is absent in choiceless awareness). We then explore the nature of awakened awareness with references to how this appears in the teachings of the Buddha, the Thai Forest tradition, and the Tibetan Dzogchen and Mahamudra traditions. Finally, some of the main accessing techniques to open to awakened awareness are described.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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Settling, Seeing, and Luminous Awareness
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2021-10-11
On Death | Monday Night Talk
58:46
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Jack Kornfield
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We live in a culture of denial and youth. How can we find a freedom of heart in this world of birth and death? We can start by acknowledging that everything is subject to change. Death is an advisor that can give us clarity about what really matters.
We can be the loving witness of this life, yet not cling to it. We can cherish life, yet in the end we will have to let go.
As Mary Oliver writes:
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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Monday and Wednesday Talks
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2021-10-06
The Seven Factors of Awakening
68:45
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Donald Rothberg
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After a brief review of the last two sessions that Donald has offered on traditional teachings about awakening and contemporary maps of the path of awakening, we explore the core teaching of the Seven Factors of Awakening: mindfulness, investigation, resolve or energy, joy or rapture, tranquility, concentration, and equanimity. We look both individually at each of the seven, and also suggest a number of ways of practicing with this teaching, whether in a particular meditation session, in daily life, or over a sustained period of time. At the end, there is some discussion.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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Monday and Wednesday Talks
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2021-10-04
The Nature of Awakening: Traditional and Contemporary Maps
1:11:48
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Donald Rothberg
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While much of our interest in practice may be focused on finding some degree of peace and understanding, or on making workable challenging states of body, mind, and heart, it's helpful to keep the vision of how practice aims at awakening (bodhi). In this talk, we explore how the Buddha understood awakening and the path to awakening, as well as perspectives on the lived experience of awakening from later Buddhist traditions. We then ask the question about whether a contemporary path of awakening simply follows the traditional path of awakening. We explore how it's important also to include as parts of the path of awakening teachings and practices that help us work with both more psychological material (such as connected with difficult early experiences, trauma, limiting beliefs, etc.) and with our social conditioning (such as around race, gender, sexuality, class, age, etc.), areas that may not be adequately transformed only with the resources of traditional paths of awakening.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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Monday and Wednesday Talks
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2021-09-20
Forgiving Heart | Monday Night Talk
53:08
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Jack Kornfield
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There’s a truth and reality deeper than conflict. We are not the stories we tell ourselves. How do we touch our measure of suffering? With a forgiving heart. Step out of the tyranny of self-judgment. Forgive yourself for being a learner in this life.
Three principles of wise forgiveness of others:
1. Forgiveness is not weak, naïve. It’s not "forgive or forget." It takes real courage. Forgiveness does not condone what happened nor allow it to continue.
2. Forgiveness is not quick. It is often a long, difficult, tender process of the heart digesting the pain of what happened.
3. Forgiveness is not for them—it’s for you. It’s about our own heart not being chained to the past.
Sometimes it's your loving heart that opens your broken heart. We can let go. We can put down the burden of resentment. We can live with a gracious heart.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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Monday and Wednesday Talks
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2021-09-08
Awakening and Paths of Awakening: Traditional and Contemporary
67:03
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Donald Rothberg
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We first review last week's theme of traditional understandings of awakening and the path to awakening, focused on the teachings of the Buddha, of the Thai Forest tradition, and of Tibetan Dzogchen and Mahamudra. Then we explore the question whether we have need as well of contemporary maps of paths to awakening, to get at dimensions of contemporary greed, aversion, and delusion that are not identified in traditional maps. We suggest the need for such maps, and for integrating traditional understandings with examination particularly of psychological and social conditioning. If not transformed, such conditioning can lead to many problems for all practitioners, including teachers and those with some significant taste of awakening. Discussion follows.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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Monday and Wednesday Talks
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2021-09-07
The Six Realms: Action and Identity in a Conscious World
47:43
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Sean Oakes
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The ancient Buddhist map of existence known as the Six Realms is both a vision of the cosmos and all its inhabitants and an elegant psychological model we can use in everyday life. Working with the realms as psychological archetypes (demon, ghost, animal, human, titan, angel) reveals patterns in how we process both harm and help in our personal and collective past, which play out as trauma and privilege in the present. Differently, and maybe more radically, working with them from an Animist framework reveals a conscious universe, where nature of all kinds is interdependent, intelligent, and part of the round of rebirth in which we all participate until full awakening. Seeing in this way challenges our identity, not just as ourselves but as defined by our species.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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2021-09-01
Awakening
67:45
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Donald Rothberg
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After a number of sessions focused on practicing with reactivity and with challenges, we focus on awakening and awakened qualities. We survey the Buddha's main understanding of awakening as the ending of greed, aversion, and ignorance, as well as his pointing to a "signless, boundless, luminous" awareness at times. We also explore some of the understandings of a similar "awakened awareness" found in the Thai Forest tradition and the Tibetan Dzogchen and Mahamudra traditions (in part through slides, which can be found below, at this Dharma Seed site). Finally, the suggestion is made to set the intention especially this next week to cultivate one or two awakened qualities.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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Monday and Wednesday Talks
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Attached Files:
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Awakening Slides
by Donald Rothberg
(PDF)
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2021-08-23
Loving Witness
45:27
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Jack Kornfield
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In any moment you can become the loving witness—it’s why we sit in meditation. We learn to sit with both heartbreak and love—with whatever arises. We become the loving witness of it all. What channel do you turn to amidst the joy and sorrows? With mindful loving awareness we can see it all anew. When we see with amazement, with loving awareness, we also see with the heart.
As Mary Oliver writes:
“And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood….
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular….
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement….”
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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Monday and Wednesday Talks
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2021-08-04
Deepening Daily Life Practice 4: Practicing with the Eight Worldly Winds 2
69:42
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Donald Rothberg
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We begin by naming some of the important supports for daily life practice and by exploring further the importance of practicing with reactivity (compulsively and habitually grasping after or pushing away). It's helpful to focus on the center of practice: Transforming reactivity and learning better how to respond skillfully in all parts of our lives. It's also important to name some of the complexities of practicing with reactivity: (1) Seeing that the pleasant and unpleasant aren't the problem, that reactivity is the problem; (2) understanding that this isn't about passivity but rather about skillful response; and (3) clarifying that reactivity can often be enmeshed with important insight, clarity, and intelligence, such that the aim of practice is to separate out the reactivity from the insight. In this context, we then look further at the Eight Worldly Winds (pleasure or pain, gain or loss, fame or disrepute, and praise or blame) and point to a number of guidelines and suggestions for practicing when they arise.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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Monday and Wednesday Talks
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