Spirit Rock Meditation Center: dharma talks and meditation instruction

(Spirit Rock Meditation Center)

(Spirit Rock Meditation Center)

(Spirit Rock Meditation Center)

(Spirit Rock Meditation Center) Reflections on Solstice, How to Meditate, Wise Attitude, and guided RAIN practice

(Spirit Rock Meditation Center) A Winter Solstice reflection on faith (saddha) as heartfelt confidence rather than blind belief. Drawing on personal stories of religious transitions and crisis, this talk explores how suffering can become the ground for genuine spiritual trust—the kind that arises from direct experience and opens us to the possibility of awakening exactly as we are. Through poetry, Buddhist teachings, and the paradox of being already free while still practicing, we examine how verified faith allows us to meet life with both acceptance and wise action.

(Spirit Rock Meditation Center) Guided meditation on Caring Figure practice and receiving unconditional love.

(Spirit Rock Meditation Center)

(Spirit Rock Meditation Center) We continue with the exploration opened up last week in our examination of "skillful desire," starting again with the common misunderstanding of the Buddha's teachings as suggesting giving up all wanting of the pleasant and all not wanting of the unpleasant. There are, to be sure, some passages in the teachings which seem to suggest this approach; here is one example, from the Sallatha Sutta about the results of practice: “Desirable things don't charm the mind, undesirable ones bring no resistance."

In the talk, we first review the nature of skillful desire and the distinction between skillful and unskillful desire. A starting reference point is the understanding of the sequence from contact to grasping in the teaching on Dependent Origination and. We look again at the Buddha's teachings on chanda or "skillful desire" and the importance of experiences of pleasure, joy, and happiness in different practice contexts. We then look in a similar way at skillful aversion, asking about the distinction between skillful and unskillful aversion, and pointing especially to the importance of inquiry into the experience of aversion; we look with some detail into the experience of anger. Finally, we connect our explorations with the experience of darkness and light at the time of the Winter Solstice, four days from now.

(Spirit Rock Meditation Center) We start with settling for about 8 minutes followed by about the same time with basic mindfulness practice. Then we explore "moderate" experiences of pleasant or unpleasant when they occur, whether a bodily experience, an emotion, or a thought (or a mix), experiencing pleasant or unpleasant and seeing whether there follows wanting (or not wanting) and reactivity (habitual grasping or pushing away). We close with some reflection on what we explored, with an emphasis on skillful aversion: Was some of the not wanting skillful? Unskillful? What do we find in some daily life examples of aversion? This exploration is related to the talk given a short time later.

(Spirit Rock Meditation Center)