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.
We can be aware of many objects in meditation. It's also possible to turn our attention to awareness itself. The talk explores what happens when we do this. Is awareness findable? Does it come and go? Is it conditioned? And what is the value of meditating like this?
All the phenomena of our senses are empty of any solid substance or essence. It may be more appropriate to refer to phenomena as "appearances" rather than "objects." This theme is explored through the Sutta "A Lump of Foam" in the Samyutta Nikaya.
The Buddha said many times that no self is to be found in the phenomena of our senses. But still, the sense of a self in us arises over and over. This talk explores through sutta references how this sense of self is created in the moment and how it can cease.
This talk was given on the opening night of the Emptiness Retreat.
It introduces the theme of emptiness as a lack of unchanging essence or substance. This retreat encourages us to explore the possibility that things are not as they appear to be.
The first two links of dependent origination say that ignorance gives rise to volitional formations or impulses. The talk describes succesive layers of obscurations that form from ignorance, to a belief in self, to afflictive emotions, to unskillful actions. The path undoes these layers by focusing, in order, on virtue, mediation, and wisdom, finally penetrating to nibbana.
This is a guided meditation on the quality of appreciative joy, or mudita. There is also a short introduction on the role of appreciative joy in the four divine abidings (brahma vihares).
The near enemy of metta is attached affection, common in romantic love. The far enemy is aversion, which takes many forms, such as resentment and fear. The talk explores these responses and how to work with them in metta practice.
