I have always enjoyed working with practitioners who are continuing to deepen their practice. In the many long retreats I teach at both IMS and Spirit Rock, I feel free to pass on the deepest pointings I’ve found in the teachings of the Buddha in the Pali Canon. Those are my guiding lights in practice and understanding.
It is fun for me to take the most difficult concepts and put them into accessible language, to unwrap the mystery. So I try to find ways to explore the breadth of concepts like "emptiness" -- to see how the entire path can be explained in terms of this synonym for nibbana. One of my aims is to bring the goal of freedom into the here and now. This way practitioners get a taste of freedom, so they know what they are heading toward on their journey to liberation.
The tools of mindfulness and lovingkindness can be picked up by anyone. They are easy to understand and they bring immediate benefit to our lives. The essence of vipassana is ideally suited to western society, especially to the resonance between our psychological turn of mind and our quest for spiritual understanding.
Emptiness, one of the most important concepts in Buddhism, refers to fundamental understandings of our human condition, deep spiritual insight, and the radical experience of liberation.
Describes the Buddha's basic teaching on Karma as action with volition. By choosing carefully which volitions to follow, we can guide our practice to great levels of happiness. Also describes the results of action, the relation to the concept of not-self, and explores what leads to the end of karma.
The First Noble Truth, that there is suffering in life, has a call to action: this truth is to be fully understood. The Second Noble Truth, that the cause of suffering is craving, also has a call to action: craving is to be abandoned. Abandoning craving moves us to the Third Noble Truth, the end of suffering.
Upasika Kee was a wonderful woman teacher in Thailand in the last century. She used "unentangled knowing" to refer to a mind that is not caught up in sense objects, but is keenly aware of its own nature. Dependent origination shows how we get caught and how we can be freed.
This talk explores the Buddha's teaching on not-self through the schema of the five aggregates. A sense of self is created by grasping at form, feeling, perception, formations or consciousness. What is the experience like when no grasping is taking place?
