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Donald Rothberg's Dharma Talks at Spirit Rock Meditation Center
Donald Rothberg
Donald Rothberg, PhD, has practiced Insight Meditation since 1976, and has also received training in Tibetan Dzogchen and Mahamudra practice and the Hakomi approach to body-based psychotherapy. Formerly on the faculties of the University of Kentucky, Kenyon College, and Saybrook Graduate School, he currently writes and teaches classes, groups and retreats on meditation, daily life practice, spirituality and psychology, and socially engaged Buddhism. An organizer, teacher, and former board member for the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Donald has helped to guide three six-month to two-year training programs in socially engaged spirituality through Buddhist Peace Fellowship (the BASE Program), Saybrook (the Socially Engaged Spirituality Program), and Spirit Rock (the Path of Engagement Program). He is the author of The Engaged Spiritual Life: A Buddhist Approach to Transforming Ourselves and the World and the co-editor of Ken Wilber in Dialogue: Conversations with Leading Transpersonal Thinkers.
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2021-08-25 Practicing with Challenges: Individual, Relational, and Collective 69:17
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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.
Spirit Rock Meditation Center :  Monday and Wednesday Talks
2021-08-04 Deepening Daily Life Practice 4: Practicing with the Eight Worldly Winds 2 69:42
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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.
Spirit Rock Meditation Center :  Monday and Wednesday Talks
2021-08-04 Guided Meditation: Practicing with the Eight Worldly Winds 2 37:38
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After some general instructions for settling and seeing clearly and a period of practice, there is guidance for practicing with the Eight Worldly Winds (pleasure or pain, gain or loss, fame or disrepute, and praise or blame). We focus first on being attentive to moderate or greater levels of pleasant or unpleasant experiences (when the experiences are in the "workable" range). Then we bring in attention to the other Winds, when they arise.
Spirit Rock Meditation Center :  Monday and Wednesday Talks
2021-07-28 Deepening Daily Life Practice 3: Practicing with the Eight Worldly Winds 68:43
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We begin with a review of the last two sessions related to deepening daily life practice, including identifying some of the challenges of contemporary daily life practice and some basic ways of deepening such practice, the importance for such practice of mindfulness of the body, and the centrality of practicing with reactivity (based on looking closely at the sequence from contact to grasping or pushing away). We then, for the rest of the session, explore the teaching of the Eight Worldly Winds (pleasure or pain, gain or loss, fame or disrepute, and praise or blame) as a way of looking out for eight specific experiences that are likely to lead to reactivity. In all of this, we focus on how we might learn from and respond skillfully to such challenging situations rather than simply react in a largely unconscious and habitual way. The talk is followed by a discussion.
Spirit Rock Meditation Center :  Monday and Wednesday Talks
2021-07-28 Deepening Daily Life Practice 3: A Guided Meditation: Settling, Practicing with Pleasant and Unpleasant and Tendencies to Reactivity, Practicing with the Eight Worldly Winds 37:48
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In this guided meditation, we start with about 10 minutes of settling. We then attend to when there is a moderate or greater pleasant or unpleasant feeling-tone, bringing some investigation as to what occurs in ones' experience, including tendencies to reactivity (grasping or pushing away). Toward the end of the guided meditation, there's an invitation to track for those forms of reactivity coming after one of the Eight Worldly Winds (pleasure or pain, gain or loss, fame or disrepute, and praise or blame).
Spirit Rock Meditation Center :  Monday and Wednesday Talks
2021-07-07 Deepening Daily Life Practice 2: Practicing with Reactivity 69:27
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We begin with a review of last week's opening exploration of deepening daily life practice, naming some of the challenges of daily life practice, some initial ways of deepening such practice, and the centrality for such practice of mindfulness of the body. We then, for the rest of the session, explore how we can practice with reactivity when it arises, in its two forms--grasping after the pleasant and pushing away what is taken as unpleasant. We ground such practice in the Buddha's teaching in the model of Dependent Origination of the sequence from contact to feeling-tone to wanting (or not wanting) to grasping (or pushing away). We then point to a number of ways of practicing with reactivity and some of the complexities of such practice, particularly the ways in which reactivity can be enmeshed with discernment. A discussion follows!
Spirit Rock Meditation Center :  Monday and Wednesday Talks
2021-07-07 Deepening Daily Life Practice 2: A Guided Meditation: Practicing with Reactivity 26:04
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In this guided meditation, we start with about 10 minutes of settling. We then attend to when there is a moderate or greater pleasant or unpleasant feeling-tone, bringing some investigation as to what occurs in ones' experience. Toward the end of the guided meditation, there's an invitation to track for any moment of reactivity (grasping onto the pleasant in some way, or pushing away the unpleasant).
Spirit Rock Meditation Center :  Monday and Wednesday Talks
2021-06-30 Deepening Daily Life Practice 1 68:12
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In an important sense, daily life practice is central and vital; it is where we live! Yet at times in the non-monastic Insight Meditation approach as it's developed in the West, such practice has been somewhat marginalized, with retreat practice and formal meditation practice at the center. We explore first the challenging context of daily life practice for many Western practitioners, including not just such a lack of sustained emphasis on daily life practice, but also the challenges of living in what is often a very busy, "mental" culture and society. We then look at a number of ways to bring more awareness into daily life, inviting the listener to see what one or two ways of practicing might be emphasized in the next period of time. We give a more in-depth focus on one very central way of bringing more awareness into daily life--developing mindfulness of the body. We offer a number of different practices that support such mindfulness of the body.
Spirit Rock Meditation Center :  Monday and Wednesday Talks
2021-06-23 Buddhist Practice and Transforming Racism: Nine Reflections from the Last Year 69:33
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A year after the massive demonstrations in the US following the killing of George Floyd, we reflect on different aspects of the integration of Buddhist practice and transforming racism, identifying nine key themes.
Spirit Rock Meditation Center :  Monday and Wednesday Talks
2021-06-07 Doing, Not-Doing, and The Doing That Comes from Not-Doing: In Meditation and in Daily Life 64:49
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We inquire into doing and not-doing in five ways: (1) identifying the importance of a number of different kinds of "doing" and skillful effort in meditation; (2) pointing also to the centrality of a kind of not-doing (or letting go of doing) and receptivity in meditation; (3) the importance of investigating the "doer" and one's identity as a doer, in a number of different ways, in meditation and daily life; (4) the vision of a doing that comes out of being, that comes out of a deep not-doing, a vision that we find in different spiritual traditions--here we mention ways that this vision is found in Jewish, Christian, Taoist, and Buddhist traditions; and (5) how we explore and cultivate this doing coming out of a deep not-doing in daily life, in "flow experiences," in activities in which we are deeply grounded, and in such areas as sports, music, art, and dance.
Spirit Rock Meditation Center :  Monday and Wednesday Talks

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