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.

We start with the intention to cultivate awakened qualities, then have a period of settling, followed by opening up experience and particularly noticing any reactivity (habitual grasping and pushing away) and awakened qualities, such as mindfulness, concentration, equanimity, joy, etc.

We name some of the personal, relational, and collective challenges of our current times, and point to a number of guidelines and support that help us to skillfully take such challenges as part of our practice of awakening. Discussion follows the talk.

Notice as you feel the breath, that who you are is not this breath, or this body, but you are loving awareness, the loving witness. You are consciousness itself—open, spacious, letting the breath breathe itself. Experiences can rise and fall in a field of loving awareness. Notice how emotions, feelings and thoughts rise and fall like the waves of the ocean; you are the loving witness to them all.

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….”