Sally Clough Armstrong began practicing vipassana meditation in India in 1981. She moved to the Bay Area in 1988, and worked at Spirit Rock until 1994 in a number of roles, including executive director. She began teaching in 1996, and is one of the guiding teachers of Spirit Rock's Dedicated Practitioner Program. Sally has always been inspired by the depth and the breadth of the Buddha’s teaching, as presented in the suttas of the Pali Canon, because the truth and power of the Buddha’s words still speak to us today. Her intention in teaching is to make these ancient texts and practices accessible and relevant to all levels of practitioner, from the very new to the dedicated meditator.
In the Satipatthana sutta on the foundations of mindfulness, the first area of practice is the body. The Buddha gives us many different practices and ways to investigate the body. This talk explores these practices, beginning with the breath, but going on to other practices that we don't often teach, such as the four elements, the 32 parts of the body, and corpse contemplations. Each of these practices can be a powerful doorway to wise seeing and freedom. This talk is the first of a series of four on each foundation of mindfulness.
Many of us have a tendency to be critical and judgmental of ourselves and others. In meditation, this habit can seem quite strong and can create a lot of suffering. But mindfulness is a wonderful tool to enable us to see these thoughts for what they are, so we can begin to bring wisdom and understanding to them. they then no longer dominate our heart and mind.
Mindfulness is becoming very popular in many areas of modern life: as a stress reduction, in schools, prisons, hospitals, in the workplace and so on. But what is mindfulness, and what was the Buddha talking about when he encouraged us to practice it? Right mindfulness, or Samma Sati, develops wisdom and understanding, decreasing unwholesome states of mind, increasing wholesome ones and leading us to more freedom and clarity.
This powerful teaching form the Upanisa Sutta shows us how suffering when understood with wisdom leads to faith and is the beginning of a natural unfolding of beautiful qualities of the heart which provide the foundation for the mind to turn to awakening.
Any time we practice mindfulness and wise attention, we are weakening the impact of the hindrances, and strengthening what are known as the five jhanic factors: meditative qualities that support the continuity and deepening of our meditation. Each of the jhanic factors actually balances and acts as an antidote to one of the hindrances. This talk looks at how to strengthen the jhanic factors, and use them skillfully as antidotes to the hindrances.
Though we receive lots of instructions for our meditation practice on retreats, let’s face it – we spend a lot of time thinking. What do we think about? At the heart of these movements of the mind is answering the questions, “Am I OK?”, “Was I OK?”, and “Will I be OK?” Our obsession with these questions is the cause of a huge amount of restlessness. Restlessness is one of the major hindrances to calming the mind and deepening our meditation, and can be seen as both the cause and the effect of all the other hindrances. The Buddha also talked about this kind of thinking, and called it unwise attention that leads to all kinds of suffering. We need to look at the core issues that lead us to dwell on these questions if we are to create a more skilful relationship to our thoughts.
