The main person who gets in the way of allowing us to feel sympathetic joy (mudita in Pali) and gratitude is you know who. Often we compare ourselves to others and find we don’t measure up in some way. Envy and jealousy are the opposites of sympathetic joy. The Buddha encouraged us to challenge our assumptions and to cultivate this capacity to find joy in the good fortune of others. Ajahn Pasanno says, “Cutting through self-view is the Buddha’s unique contribution to spiritual practice. Mudita is antithetical to the self-view that we carry around with us and leads us to a place of boundless and immeasurable joy.”
We rightly place strong emphasis on mindfulness of the body and mindfulness of mind states in our practice of meditation and everyday awareness. These are the first and third ways of establishing mindfulness as described in the Satipatthana Sutta, one of the core teachings of our Insight tradition. Sometimes overlooked is the Second Foundation of Mindfulness: mindfulness of feeling tone (vedana in Pali). A feeling tone of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral accompanies every experience, physical or mental. Unnoticed, these feeling tones can escalate to desire, aversion, or delusion and cause us to suffer. When noticed, they can lead us to expand our range of situations where we can feel okay, regardless of outside circumstances. On this evening, we will explore vedana in our guided meditation and in the dharma talk and following discussion. Rich encourages you to practice noticing vedana in the week leading up to this evening, so you can report directly from your experience in the discussion session. If you are unfamiliar with the practice and need instruction, email Rich Howard.
Our minds tend to see the world as dualistic. Life – personal, relationship, financial, political choices – seems to be limited to two dimensional competing alternatives, an either/or proposition.
Unless we pause and step back from the drama of the moment, we lose touch with the nuance, beauty, and multi-dimensional nature of life, and life choices. We fail to see and experience the underlying reality that the world operates on a wide continuum of related and inter-dependent events, experiences, and choices.
We lose access to the most important, skillful, and healing life option – collaborating with life as it is, and collaborating with others as they are.
This Thursday evening will explore this field of experiences through common situations in meditation and everyday living.
The subject matter of this evening will be appropriate for all stages of practice.
The monastic path of meditation and seclusion has been the primary image of awakened life as the west has encountered the Dharma. We will talk about how emerging Buddhist forms may take on more elements of engagement and the brahma viharas than of the monastic style of seclusion and renunciation.
In addition to a teaching on the topic, which will include simple practices you can do in daily life, the teaching will end with an optional short simple ritual to bring in the new year together. If you are joining us via zoom, please have the following handy: a Kleenex or sock; 2 pieces of paper (any size, but small is fine), a pencil or pen.
As the new year approaches, we take stock of 2023 and our lives, not as we wish them to be or fear them to be but as they truly are. And we look with integrity at the changes we hope to make in the near future.
We will contemplate how we can embody the Four Noble Truths and live wisely and even joyfully with the reality of our lives.
All of us have experiences which change the direction of our lives.
Sometimes we know this at the moment it is happening. Other times, we only realize it later. One of those experiences can be encountering a book that causes us to question how we are living or helps us have a new vision of practice or life.
This evening will explore ten books that mattered in this way for SIM’s Founding Teacher, Dennis Warren. Each book will be discussed from the viewpoint of how it was encountered, its impact, and the change or shift in direction that followed. Dennis will discuss why each book was helpful for him…and maybe for you.
The subject matter of this evening will be appropriate for all stages of practice.