Faith and Challenges/Sustaining Practice
In the Insight Meditation tradition as practiced at SIM, faith is an experiential quality of engagement rather than doctrinaire adherence to a top-down belief system. And obstacles to practice, however unwelcome they may feel, are the field of practice through which we learn about our own minds and the path away from “suffering” (the experience of “unsatisfactoriness”). Join Laura Rosenthal, a long-time SIM participant, for a group discussion about how we sustain our engagement with practice in the face of the obstacles, many of them self-generated, that we encounter. Laura will set the stage with a very brief overview of faith and “the hindrances” as well as basic principles of “dharma dialog,” and will then facilitate a group discussion. We will sit in a circle to support active listening and sharing.
Laura is a graduate of Spirit Rock Meditation Center’s Dedicated Practitioners’ Program. She is currently participating in Spirit Rock’s Advanced Practitioners’ Program and Heather Sundberg’s Committed Students’ Program.