Ajahn Sucitto's most recent Dharma talks (Vallecitos Mountain Retreat Center)

(Cittaviveka) It’s important to learn to feel our thoughts. When thoughts are felt, there’s an instinctive filtering for true, uncluttered, undistracted thoughts. Chanting gives us a way to practice with this.

(Cittaviveka) Tune into the capacity to open and be sensitive. Listen in a feeling way to the pulses, tinglings, warmth of the body. Everything that resonates in your heart is felt directly in the body. Stay with awareness and allow feelings and emotions to shift, move, be ventilated and pass.

(Cittaviveka) Citta requires strength to meet the afflictive perceptions and meanings that compress it. Shutting down and distracting ourselves is understandable, but inadequate. Cultivation of spiritual faculties gives citta tools and capacity to meet phenomena with compassion and skillful action.

(Cittaviveka) With the sīla practice in place, we give attention to samādhi practice – finding our center within the world of sense contact. From this steady place we are present, witnessing, attuning to how citta is touched by it all.

(Cittaviveka) Precepts are what most skillfully link citta to the world of sense contact. Without this ethical sense, citta runs out and gets into damaging circumstances. Precepts are the way you communicate the Dhamma through your actions into the world.

(Cittaviveka) The fundamental citta sense is an ethical sense. We try to encourage that with precepts. This is how we align ourselves to citta.

(Cittaviveka) Introduction to online format and schedule, encouragements for how to practice and make the most of these circumstances.

(Cittaviveka) Purification of mind is not just spiritual jargon but necessary for happiness. No matter how gross or subtle, our speech, mental intentions and bodily actions affect us. Training and cleaning citta involves bringing uplifting qualities to mind and refraining from contracting to the unpleasant. This is how our kamma can begin to change.

(Dharma College) Can you comment on the other 3 foundations of mindfulness aside from body; is ‘heart-mind’ the translation for citta; is kamma self-perpetuating; please say more about tendency of untrained mind to outflow and how to reverse them; differentiate interdependency and toxic co-dependency in relationships; please explain mindful internally, externally, and both; please speak about how we can manage fear in this time of Corona virus; what is meant by ‘citta is released’; how do we work with aversion, like chemical sensitivity; what is the difference between citta as direct knowing and citta as learning; can you speak more about cleaning out the citta?

(Dharma College) With mindfulness of body, we have a place where we can withdraw from the constructed world and come into direct experience. The body acts as a giant sense organ – feeling, sensing, open to it all. The body can clean encumbrances we would otherwise carry around with us.