In this talk, Aishah Shahidah Simmons explores the Buddha's teaching on the Five Hindrances — Sensual Desire, Ill Will, Sloth and Torpor, Restlessness and Worry, and Doubt — drawing on the Saṅgārava Sutta's water similes, the lineage of Sayagyi U Bha Kin through Rev. Dr. Leon E. Wright, and the words of Toni Cade Bambara and Audre Lorde. Offered through a BIPOC lens on Juneteenth, this teaching invites recognizing the hindrances with tenderness, not self-judgment, as a lifetime's practice toward liberation.

Includes instructions on 6-Part walking meditation at the end.

Sets the condition for wisdom to arise - help us see through the concotions of perception, thought and view.

An exploration of the First Establishment of Mindfulness

Dolls, loss, love and the narrative cure. Kafka consoles a girl with a series of letters about a lost doll. An excursion into four different and indispensable tasks for any contemplative practitioner: (i) Calming & stabilzing (ii) Dis-identification and decentering (iii) Deep Inquiry and thorough contemplative Investigation (iv) The bigger Picture – gaining an universal perspective on the personal

Morning instructions

Satipaṭṭhāna as map of experience. Somatic - hedonic - affective - discursive 'raw-materials' in these four categories. Relationship between these channels. Citta and the particular challenges with the states of the mind as objects of practice. Establishing a somatic vocabulary for your moods. The ending of something as an easy connection point to citta-states.

Breakdown of types of ignorance in Buddhist teaching. Unpacking some of the terms avijjā and moha. Sketching their different use in the old texts despite their occasional synonymous use. Excursions into conditionality.

Morning instructions