The past and future are only thoughts in the present. But even the present moment is constructed, concocted, conditioned and may not exist absolutely as we believe it to be. Our experience of the senses is dependent on our sense organs thus animals have different eyes and experience the world very differently. Different human cultures experience and interpret sense experience differently as well. Plus practice tips on week 3 of a monthlong retreat.
We need to explore how to find and develop true compassion which is a beautiful quality of opening our hearts to the suffering inside and outside ourselves. While there is pain in suffering we can actually grow to have a sweet heart of compassion when we know how to breath open heartedly in contact with pain and suffering. When we find true compassion we don't need to shrink back from what is difficult but rather use the commonalities of difficulties to feel warm and expanded.
Explores the Buddha’s teachings on aging, illness, death, loss, and karma—brought to life through Dharma reflections and evocative stories, inviting us to meet impermanence with wisdom, presence, and the freedom to love fully.
The Buddha wanted us to learn how to wakefully "stream", to realize we are forever and only a stream of mental and physical phenomena. We have no part internally or externally which is permanent, though in daily life we subjectively feel as if there is a lot of dependably permanent parts of life. With the deepening intimacy of mindfulness all there is is a flow and change. With patience we can learn to find liberation within the universal aspect of impermanence.
There is a style of mindfulness practice where we lightly attending a central, familiar anchor of attention, such as the breath or scanning the body, and then intentionally choose to watch our minds move through its habits and its nature. In this style of mindfulness practice we can watch our attention move through our six sense doors of stimulation. With this style of meditation we can directly see the dharma nature of our mind.
With this style of practice we have to be careful we not lose attentiveness, which can be a shadow side of choiceless attention. We want to keep learning and discovering the dharma, and not space out into half committed mindfulness.
