Three Steps to Awakening
Date: 2024-06-06 Thursday
This week we’ll be exploring a wonderful sutta in the Numerical Discourses, which describes the path in a way easy to digest and to fulfill. We’ll be offering this to clarify our journey forward, in a way that hopefully will be helpful to you.
The sutta is in the Book of Threes, 92 (1) Titled Urgent:
“So too, bhikkhus, there are these three urgent tasks of a bhikkhu. What three? (1) The undertaking of the training in the higher virtuous behavior, (2) the undertaking of the training in the higher mind, and (3) the undertaking of the training in the higher wisdom.”
We’ll explore these three, and some expansions of them later in this section of the Book of Threes, to see what light they shed on how we progress on the path.
Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.
How to Cherish Yourself When There is No Self
Date: 2024-05-16 Thursday
This week we’ll be exploring one of the seeming conundrums of the path: How to cherish yourself when there is no self.
As you’ll see, a key part of navigating this – cherishing ourselves as we would any other sentient being – comes back to the essential question of who we are, what we’re ultimately made up of, and if there is any inherent self there to doubt or not cherish.
This resonates with the title of one of Anam Thubten’s books: “No Self, no Problem.”
Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.
How to Bring Mindfulness to Thinking
Date: 2024-03-21 Thursday
For this evening we will be exploring what often seems the primo bugaboo of meditation, the constant arising of thinking. While it can seem a problem, and there’s benefit if and when a quieter and more centered mind arises, there just as much benefit from being mindful of busy mind.
We’ll see that part of our problem isn’t that thinking is arising, but that we believe there’s an “I” doing that thinking. As we see through that identification, the entire skein starts to unravel, into freedom.
Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.
Unpacking the Four Foundations of Mindfulness
Date: 2024-03-07 Thursday
For this week we’ll be doing a sweep of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, something that can be extremely helpful with your practice life.
The four foundations are the very core of how the Buddha taught us to do mindfulness practice, and rich with subtleties and depth. But just because of this depth, teachings on them tend to be long and multi-part, and books tend to be large, so we’re taken away from the overview to the parts.
For this session we’re going to sweep over the four in one session, with some tips about how to use them in our practice, and some understandings about how the four interconnect.
Whether you’re new to the practice or seasoned, these four foundations always have new gold to offer us.
Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.
One Perfect Night: Bringing Your Practice to the Present
Date: 2024-02-01 Thursday
For this week we’ll be exploring two of the Buddha’s most vibrant suttas about conducting our path journey in present life – MN 131 and 131 – both of which are often called “A single Excellent Night.”
You’ll find this very helpful for keeping your sense of direction, and momentum, in the midst of the peculiarities of 2024.
Here’s a link: Bhaddekaratta Sutta: An Auspicious Day.
Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.
Energizing Our Path and Practice in 2024
Date: 2024-01-04 Thursday
For this first sit of the year, Thursday, Jan. 4, we’ll be exploring tactics and attitudes for keeping our practice revitalized in the coming year. Our spiritual path is there to help us, to bring joy to life, so let’s look at how we can deepen our practice in 2024, with the moment-by-moment awareness that is at the center of how we grow and give.
Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.
How the Life of Moggallana, One of the Buddha’s Two Chief Disciples, Informs Our Own Journeys
Date: 2023-12-21 Thursday
As is our tradition, we’ll be touching on the sacred life of the Buddha, at this most sacred time for our Christian sister and brothers. So for this sit we’ll be exploring the life and manifestation of the great master and monk Mogallana.
The Buddha had two chief disciples, Sariputta and Mogallana. This latter was known for his sometimes-miraculous powers, but also for his great compassion and kindness. Mogallana was the disciple who could take students all the way to becoming an arahant. Let's see how his life, the choices he made, inform our own lives, our possibilities, and our practice.
Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.
Benefiting from the Parallel Teachings of Buddha and Jesus
Date: 2023-12-07 Thursday
With the sacred holiday season on us, we're going to explore the limitless kindness of two great masters - the Buddha and Jesus Christ - and see how they parallel. There's much to learn from the similarities of these two great beings, who lived 500 years and thousands of miles apart
Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.
The Five Precepts
Date: 2023-11-16 Thursday
For this Nov. 16 sit we’re very happy to welcome Sooz Appel, a person of decades of practice experience, who serves as one of the Seattle Insight Meditation Society local dharma leaders.
Sooz’s talk will be:
Practicing with the precepts: making them your own.
She writes:
“The precepts are a powerful and often challenging part of the path. They are powerful because they offer practical guideposts for living an ethical life. They are challenging because often we don’t (or can’t or choose not to) follow them exactly.
Each of the precepts contain within it complexities and nuances. Whether it’s the challenges of gardeners facing if and how to eliminate unwanted “pests,” or lifestyle choices that may include intoxicants, or how to interpret “taking only what is given”—exploring these further is a fruitful conversation to have with ourselves and each other.”
Here’s some background on Sooz:
“Sooz Appel was introduced to Vipassana meditation in 1983 at a death and dying retreat with Stephen Levine. Later that year, she and two friends established Shanti Seattle, which offered emotional support to people who were dying. She joined SIMS when it formed and served on the board and as president from 2001-2003. Over the years, Sooz has filled nearly every volunteer position in SIMS and continues to give of her time and energy to the sangha. In addition to issues of death and dying, Sooz has offered mindfulness opportunities (classes and retreats) to teenagers through both the Seattle Teen Mindfulness Circle and Inward Bound Mindfulness Education (iBme).
Sooz is semi-retired having spent 25 years running a recycling company with her life partner. She now helps to manage their commercial property with its dozen small business tenants.”
Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.
Bringing Love to All, In a Tortured World
Date: 2023-10-19 Thursday
For this evening we’ll be exploring the limitlessness of loving kindness and compassion as the Buddha taught, and how he never conditioned that loving kindness on what people did. Cultivating this limitless loving kindness can be hard, when we find someone to blame. Thus we’ll take some time to see what that stretching is like, and how it can transform our ultimate attitude toward those with whom we disagree.
Let’s call this “Sharing love and compassion, with a world in pain.”
Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.
Changing the Mind Through Lojong Practice
Date: 2023-09-21 Thursday
For this evening we’ll be exploring, in a brief dip into Mahayana, the practices around mind training .
In Tibetan Buddhism, the exercises of seven-point mind training, called Lo Jong, are a testing and beautiful way to harness the realities of life in a spiritual and transcendent manner. We will explore some of these aphorisms, and see how useful they can be in our own lives.
Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.
Bahiya Sutta: When You See, Just See
Date: 2023-09-07 Thursday
For this session we’ll be exploring the famous Bahiya Sutta, which is simultaneously about the high stakes of the path of awakening, and the possibility of attaining that goal. It also contains a simple Zen-like message, of the absolute immediacy of our practice.
Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.
Four Foundations: Fourth Foundation
Date: 2023-08-03 Thursday
For this session we’ll be exploring the fourth foundation of mindfulness, which is dhammas, sometimes translated as “’mind objects.”
This is a multi-part foundation, which can seem complex, so we’ll be focusing on what difference this fourth foundation can make in our hearts and minds. While in one way this fourth foundation can seem as a “list of lists,” in another it empowers us to find release, an open heart, just in the complexities that life inherently offers us.
Yes, this 2023 life is complex, but actually the essentials are just as they were 2,600 years ago at the time of the Buddha, and clarifying that helps bring us freedom now.
The four foundation of mindfulness are the Buddha’s core teaching on our practice of mindfulness, in the Satipatthana Sutta, #10 in the Middle Length Discourses (Majjhima Nikaya.) This sutta is an ever-revealing source of understanding, as we gradually deepen our mindfulness of all phenomena, and gain insight from that.
Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.
Four Foundations: Mind Qualities
Date: 2023-07-20 Thursday
For this session we’ll be exploring the third foundation of mindfulness, qualities of mind. One of the most elusive areas of our reality is the ever-changing aspect of our qualities of mind, whether grasping, aversive, restless, concentrated or other. In our mindfulness practice learning to apply mindfulness to these mind states is a great boon, lest they operate below the radar, influencing everything we think and do.
The four foundation of mindfulness are the Buddha’s core teaching on our practice of mindfulness, in the Satipatthana Sutta, #10 in the Middle Length Discourses (Majjhima Nikaya.) This sutta is an ever-revealing source of understanding, as we gradually deepen our mindfulness of all phenomena, and gain insight from that.
Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.
Four Foundations: Vedanas (Pleasant, Unpleasant, Neutral)
Date: 2023-07-06 Thursday
This week we’ll be continuing our exploration of the four foundations of mindfulness, by considering the second foundation…vedanas. This simple concept – that we instantly categorize sense door contact as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral – and automatically react, is far deeper than it seems at first.
In fact the category of vedanas is also one of the five skandas, the five factors that make up our sense of self.
Join us Thursday, and we’ll get a better sense of how mindfulness of vedanas can transform our lives, give us freedom no matter the condition.
Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.
Four Foundations: Body
Date: 2023-06-02 Friday
For the next four weeks, we’re continuing to explore the four foundations of mindfulness. For the upcoming June 1 meeting we’ll be looking at body, and why the Buddha so strongly emphasized body as an object of mindfulness.
The four foundation of mindfulness are the Buddha’s core teaching on our practice of mindfulness, in the Satipatthana Sutta, #10 in the Middle Length Discourses (Majhima Nikaya.) This sutta is worth repeatedly studying, because as we grow on the path, we will see aspects of the practice that we previously missed.
Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.
Four Foundations: Prelude
Date: 2023-05-19 Friday
For the next weeks, perhaps five, we’re going to exploring the four foundations of mindfulness. This is the Buddha’s core teaching on our practice of mindfulness, in the Satipatthana Sutta, #10 in the Middle Length Discourses (Majhima Nikaya.) This is such an important teaching to return to again and again, because it clarifies the very areas where we tend to be confused about the practice.
The journey of understanding what the Buddha is explaining to us, parallels our very journey of awakening.
The Four Foundations of Mindfulness in Plain English
Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.
Renunciation and Awakening
Date: 2023-04-20 Thursday
This will be the second week of exploring renunciation. On April 6 we explored why renunciation isn’t self-denial, but rather shedding that which entangles. This week will be exploring how renunciation leads to the letting go of awakening, how renunciation is another doorway to freedom.
Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.
Renunciation and Daily Life
Date: 2023-04-06 Thursday
For the next two weeks we’re going to exploring renunciation: for the first week why renunciation isn’t self-denial, but rather shedding that which entangles; and for the second week, how renunciation leads to the letting go of awakening.
Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.
Seven Factors of Awakening 2: Joy, Calm, Concentration, Equanimity
Date: 2023-03-02 Thursday
The March 2 sit will be our second week exploring the seven factors of awakening. These seven are aspects of mind we may already be familiar with on the path, but they take on new light, and life, when considered in this context.
They are:
Mindfulness (sati, Sanskrit smṛti). To maintain awareness of reality, in particular the teachings (Dhamma).
Investigation of the nature of reality (dhamma vicaya, Skt. dharmapravicaya).
Energy (viriya, Skt. vīrya) also determination, effort
Joy or rapture (pīti, Skt. prīti)
Relaxation or tranquility (passaddhi, Skt. prashrabdhi) of both body and mind
Concentration (samādhi) a calm, one-pointed state of mind,[1] or "bringing the buried latencies or samskaras into full view"[2]
Equanimity (upekkhā, Skt. upekshā). To accept reality as-it-is (yathā-bhuta) without craving or aversion.
For this second session we’ll be focusing on Joy, relaxation, concentration and equanimity, after exploring the first three in the last gathering.
Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.