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.
Holding on doesn’t provide you with the deep security of being held. That deeper security comes from trusting that something can carry you and you don’t have to do it. That’s what breathing does. Mindfulness of breathing sustains the right mode of attention – steady, not seeking anything, listening intently with no particular result. Relax into that and get the sense of freedom and love.
The signs and signals in the sense world very often take us out of our core presence. So we cultivate carefully honed, carefully placed signs that calm and steady us, returning us to our core presence. From this place of stability and comfort we’re able to disengage from the unskillful and meet the difficult so it can be cleared.
Explore how the body moves in space when there are no boundaries, no time pressures, no destination. Feel the swing of the pelvis and shoulders, moving through your environment with fluidity. Focused on your intimate environment, you’re not grabbed by the sense world. You can deal with the external environment more wholesomely and comfortably.
Practice is actually quite simple. It involves translating the complexities of your personal circumstances into simple emotional patterns. Breathing picks up the dominant emotional signal and transfers it through the system. We want to manage that signaling system, to stop afflicting ourselves with harmful signals and heal ourselves with affirmative signals, ones that make the body feel whole and settled. At 29:45 a simple exercise to generate healing signals.
00:12 Being at ease with suffering; 08:55 Time and space; 16:09 How to sit with constant pain; 20:23 Energy is blocked in the throat; 24:42 How to fully realize and penetrate suffering; 29:50 Hyper-tension; 36:44 Not taking things personally; 42:08 How to truly forgive; 44:31 Clearing ill-will; 46:10 Liberation through the deathless.
Practice stepping back from the complexities and coming into the embodied sense of being supported; widen the focus to include ground and space. The problematic stuff is still problematic, but there’s a possibility to step back and inquire, "How’s that?" The heart that is balanced and free from pressure naturally experiences compassion, goodwill, equanimity.
To get a handle on what we feel, we need to get past layers of "self" and into the process that establishes it. When the "self" stuff falls away the original emotional trigger can be understood and released properly. An embodied spacious presence can do that. Let the body feel an emotion, breathe it – there can be softening and a releasing, and a transformation of your emotional profile.
Emotion is a part of our intelligence. But we can become overwhelmed by emotions, triggering reactive tendencies that create our emotional profile – and that becomes ‘me’/’myself’. It’s possible to moderate this reflexive system and manage the emotions. Begin with establishing a stable base in the body and coming into presence.
With the recognition of the ending of this session, consider birth: what we’ve been through is receding, nothing new yet has begun, and we’re not going back to the same old thing. Birth is arising into that which we’re not yet entirely clear about. Nourish the potency of arising with mental qualities of goodwill, compassion, celebration and equanimity.
Where is the experience of bodily energies found in the suttas; what is the source of Ajahn’s ‘forensic precision’; how to us somatic presence with the 3rd and 4th foundations of mindfulness; please help with insomnia; experiencing resistance to standing meditation; grief and pain experienced with ‘Future and Past’ exercise; how to deepen into the ‘neither/nor’ space; is samādhi developed by sustaining sati; how to deal with overactive citta; how did you deal with the fear of death when being robbed in India?
