As a monk, I bring a strong commitment, along with the renunciate flavor, to the classic Buddhist teachings. I play with ideas, with humor and a current way of expressing the teachings, but I don't dilute them.
Sitting in a field of fifty to eighty people really starts my mind sparking. Since I don't prepare my talks ahead of time, I find myself listening to what I'm saying along with everyone else. This leaves a lot of room for the Dhamma to come up. Just having eighty people listening to me is enough to engage me, stimulate me, and create a nice flow of energy. The actual process of teaching evokes ideas that even I did not realize were being held somewhere in my mind.
Different teaching situations offer their own unique value. In retreat, you are able to build a cohesive and comprehensive body of the teachings. When people are not on retreat and come for one session, it opens a different window. They are more spontaneous and I'm given the chance to contact them in ways that are closer to their "daily-life mind." This brings up surprises and interesting opportunities for me to learn even more.
I'm continually struck by how important it is to establish a foundation of morality, commitment, and a sense of personal values for the Vipassana teachings to rest upon. Personal values have to be more than ideas. They have to actually work for us, to be genuinely felt in our lives. We can't bluff our way into insight. The investigative path is an intimate experience that empowers our individuality in a way that is not egocentric. Vipassana encourages transpersonal individuality rather than ego enhancement. It allow for a spacious authenticity to replace a defended personality.
Guided Sitting Meditation: (Guidance begins at 10 min, and then again at 25 min) Ask the body to align and find balance, then allow it to happen through vitality versus will power. Look for wholeness with regards to physical pain: rather than splitting into a 'me' who has a stiff shoulder – can it be included?
Standing Meditation: The body has an intelligence that can't be figured out by the mind. It can find the place of least stress and effort, and establish balance. In this way, embodiment moderates the mind.
When we project forward into an imagined future – a "tele-reality" – this interferes with our natural sanity. When this tele-program is unplugged, empathy, ethical sense, and wisdom grow.
Intro & Guided Meditation: Embodiment is not the visual or notional form of the body, but a domain of sensations, pressures, temperatures, and movements. When attention is turned to this embodied experience and we relax what doesn't need to be activated, calm and sensitivity are naturally generated.
Ajahn describes two pilgrimages, one a six month to India's holy places (audio book here: https://whereareyougoing.podbean.com/), and one to Mount Kailash. 01:04:10 Q1 Did you cry ever? 01:04:33 Q2 Did you feel you achieved your objectives? 01:05:17 Q3 Would you recommend this to others? 01:06:26 Q4 Would you do it again? Q5 01:06:56 In Poland where I come from, a big religious [experience] is national sport, with thousands of people walking to the shrine [/ stadium]. It’s not a pilgrimage but a great sense of community, a mass movement. 01:07:46 Q6 What was the purpose of your talk this evening? 01:08:44 Q7 One of the things I got from reading the book, somehow we get the idea we should be getting somewhere in meditation, and this got smashed to pieces several times in the book.
