I have always enjoyed working with practitioners who are continuing to deepen their practice. In the many long retreats I teach at both IMS and Spirit Rock, I feel free to pass on the deepest pointings I’ve found in the teachings of the Buddha in the Pali Canon. Those are my guiding lights in practice and understanding.
It is fun for me to take the most difficult concepts and put them into accessible language, to unwrap the mystery. So I try to find ways to explore the breadth of concepts like "emptiness" -- to see how the entire path can be explained in terms of this synonym for nibbana. One of my aims is to bring the goal of freedom into the here and now. This way practitioners get a taste of freedom, so they know what they are heading toward on their journey to liberation.
The tools of mindfulness and lovingkindness can be picked up by anyone. They are easy to understand and they bring immediate benefit to our lives. The essence of vipassana is ideally suited to western society, especially to the resonance between our psychological turn of mind and our quest for spiritual understanding.
The talk explores how the sense of self is created through the links in dependent origination. “Unentangled knowing” describes how a meditator can be in a state of full awareness of things coming and going at the sense doors without being caught in them.
We can come to a greater freedom in life by investigating the nature strong emotions and our relation to them. This talk explores working with four emotions in particular: desire, sadness, anger and fear.
Publishable online for the general public
Upasika Kee talks about finding in meditation an “inward-staying unentangled knowing.” This talk describes what this means in terms of dependent arising and offers three approaches to meditation that specifically aim at this kind of relationship to sense experience.
The Buddha talked often of seven factors that prepare the mind for awakening. Headed by mindfulness, the factors are balanced between energizing and calming states. This talk discusses each of the factors, how they are developed, and how to balance them.
There are four primal difficult emotions that come often in meditation and daily life: grief, anger, desire and fear. When we learn to relate skillfully to these emotions as they appear, there can be a great increase in the sense of freedom and ease in our life and practice.
In the Buddha’s teachings, there are five areas of practice that lead to happiness: sense pleasures (for lay people), wholesome actions (or merit), concentration, insight and awakening. Each of these offers a more complete and reliable happiness than the one before it. The talk outlines the ways each of these areas contributes to our happiness.
In beginning a long retreat, it’s helpful to reflect on the inspirations that underlie our spiritual life and how they shape our aspiration. Our inner life emerges through the simplicity of the retreat environment in contrast to an increasingly complex outside world. By trusting in silence and presence we develop the key skills we need to live wisely in both retreat and daily life.
