Lessons
Introduction - Why Meditate?
15:12 2How to Meditate - Taking Your Seat
12:59 3Placing Attention on Breath
04:32 4Labeling Thoughts as Thinking
06:35 5How to Meditate - Leaving Some Space
12:19 6Bringing Meditation Into Everyday Life
11:30 7Digging Into the Practice Part 2
05:51 8Obstacles Along the Way
08:29Obstacles Along the Way Part 2
08:59 10Body, Emotions, Mind, Stress, Anxiety
26:56 11Body, Emotions, Mind, Stress, Anxiety Part 2
06:28 12The True Meaning of Success
18:28 13The True Meaning of Success Part 2
03:40 14Developing Compassion for Ourselves & Others
04:39 15Compassion for Ourselves & Others Part 2
29:34 16Compassion and Mindfulness
26:27 17Compassion and Mindfulness Part 2
08:11 18Happiness and Joy
18:15 19Happiness and Joy Part 2
04:06 20How to Go Forward
10:59 21How to Go Forward Part 2
07:31Lesson Info
How to Go Forward
well I thought we could take an opportunity to just review what we've talked about and just have a look back because we've really covered a lot of ground. Um There's um tradition that we have about presenting a proper buffet before you sit down for the meal in the buddhist tradition, getting a sense of what all the possibilities are. Um So and then of course you're gonna choose from those what's gonna work for you and you know something you want to carry forward. Um Starting with I just thought I'd do that fast, you know the to everyone and then go forward with it. Right? So what did we start with? We started with the notion of the ground of our getting together and being together as a sort of fundamental expression of our gentleness and non aggression towards ourselves to begin with. And that we go back if we get lost, go back to that ground, that's where you go back to. Um So all along your path as you practice and go forward with um your studies and so forth. If you get lost to just...
go back to that ground of non aggression and gentleness towards oneself. Which includes the idea of making friends with oneself properly. Now that you've been properly introduced through the practice of meditation, shaking hands with your own mind. Yeah. And it's amazing how how sometimes the final frontier is not outer space but it's inter space and just getting to know ourselves a little bit better. It's amazing the final Frontier, you can send somebody to the moon and back and they still might have this practice that do at the end of that. Uh So this is kind of profound inner practice that we're really looking at here along that lines. We looked at, the first thing we kind of looked carefully at is the uh most basic practice of chama to or mindfulness meditation of being willing to sit down, leave some space. We talked about taking the space for yourself, taking the time, taking a good posture and then having a direct experience of the present awareness, which is kind of, we say it's unfettered, it's not blocked by anything actually. You're touching into something that is vast and open. And then at the same time seeing what arises for you uh in that vast sky of openness, what comes up and being equally friendly and open to looking at that. So that's that's the process of the mindfulness meditation. We're looking at the quality of being in the present and we're looking at the quality of how our own habitual mind has sort of generated whatever imagery we're working within our life, whatever themes have come up, whatever. So whatever dramas have come up for us, and we're looking at that in a friendly way, without judgment or any kind of critique. So that's a very profound kind of looking, it's looking with awareness, an unbiased kind of mind. So then let's see, what did we go to then? Um we started looking at some of the ideas of contemplative meditation. What's it like to use that creative mind and that thinking mind that's conjuring up all these sort of day mares nightmares and day mares. And and look at is there a way to use that mind creatively? Uh which is called Contemplation to explore and understand more deeply with the point of generating some kind of insight or also becoming more familiar with or cultivating qualities that we would like to develop in our lives. So that's the meaning of the contemplative meditation. Uh and we've done a whole bunch of different contemporary practice during the, during the time and we've also feathered in the mindfulness practices, the kind of steady hum you know of like return to return to base, that's our base camp, that kind of just a simple quality of awareness and cultivating that. But in the contemplation we looked at things like feeling of stress and anxiety, understanding and permanence, virtues like patience and generosity. Uh and then today we looked at the drawing the mind towards the topic of loving kindness and compassion for ourselves, for people we love for people were indifferent to and even for people that we don't care about presently. So um the other topics that we looked at kind of as worldly people looking head on into the headlights, you know, it's like um sometimes um in our lives we might feel like a deer in headlights, you know, and you kind of like just stop by the brilliance of it. And in this case we're sort of taking a moment and looking into who was driving that car that's coming at us and you know, developing some feeling for the major issues of our lives as we frame them. So for many people, the idea of success is a very important idea, having being successful um living in this world, there's a drive towards being successful in whatever terms you constructed and frame them. And we tried to look at the biggest frame possible for success, what would be a successful life and what would you yourself come to including within that? And so within that we did a little homework practice of um looking at our own aspiration, looking at our own inspiration, looking at our own motivation, looking at our own intention and looking at perspiration in the sense of what are we gonna do about any and all of it, what have we been doing, what we continue to do? We also then looked at the idea of taking the meditation practice out into the world and um mixing the quality of mindfulness and awareness with everyday life, which is really probably the main thrust of our time together here is if we take something away um it's how can we uh intermingle skillfully the cultivation of both, a kind of quality of being attentive and present within our lives and cultivating the very best qualities that we can that we can muster. Um so within that we came up with our fabulous golden dot to take over the world. Um and we have a dream to see golden dots all over san Francisco. You never know these stranger things have happened, but when we in our own house just place the golden dots, this is sort of a little project that we invited everybody to participate and just get a sheet of golden dots, yellow dots and place them like there's one right here, um there might be one in the kitchen and so forth um in a way that in the middle of our busy, busy lives, we go, oh wow, there's the sun, there's the a little dot of presence and goodness that we can just sort of stop, pause for just a moment and appreciate where we are. And that's called the Infiltration. That's our fifth column. You know, we're infiltrating into the, into the active world that we're living in and sort of dotting it with nona's. So the golden dot is the golden kind of narrowness and and delight. Really, you could say appreciation and delight. Then we took we tackle the big one in the last segment, which is the whole idea of happiness altogether. And of course that is an interesting topic because on the one hand, we could kind of be cynical and hard and going, yeah, that's that's kind of not hip enough, Happiness is not hip enough, you know? Um let's talk about shades of, you know, uh edgy kind of suffering and you know, grunge, you know, um It's funny, the grungy ist band of the last 20 years was Nirvana, which is named after Nirvana means happiness, you know, and you know, it's an interesting contemplation there even in that people are still naming uh and they've been nirvana. So Nirvana is the buddhist state of kind of transcending suffering and sort of lasting happiness. So we're looking at our own version of that and trying to come to some terms with how we could um frame our existence in terms of our understanding of what it would mean to be happy and fulfilled and joyful. Um no, which doesn't exclude suffering, it means you're getting the true meaning of suffering as to the true meaning of suffering is to learn how to transcend it. And that was the journey that the buddha took. That's the journey that were invited to take, is to engage and understand our suffering and confusion with the sort of ultimate aim of um liberating ourselves from that. So, um moving beyond that, I think the purpose of this segment is to look and see what of those things jumped out for you as viable because I'm not here to sell any particular thing and, you know, I'm sharing my life's experience, my personal experience because I moved to do that, so how to go forward, as it shows there um, somewhere out in those mountains is your life. And, you know, I'm curious to start with in terms of us really working together, what jumped out for you, What what kind of do you think you're holding at the moment from, from the three days? And, um, and then looking at, you know, seeing how we can kind of take anything like that and begin to uh, crafted into some kind of forward moving direction.
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