Becoming Authentic – Part II – Sit & Dharma Talk – A three part series with Community Mentor Diane Wilde

To review Part I of the series, click here.

Bringing our authentic selves into the world.

Please read this short discourse from the Sutta Nipata* in preparation for the evening, Confession-and-Forgiveness.pdf.

This sutta describes the importance of confession and forgiveness… in other words, being vulnerable. Practice in this way moves us away from the confines of protecting the small self, to a more spacious, “authentic” way of being. After reading the sutta, consider what is your experience with what it describes?

We will discuss bringing authenticity into the world. Authenticity for this purpose means accepting those personality traits with which we navigate the world, in conjunction with the Buddha’s advise on how to create harmony and ease in our society.

*The Sutta Nipata is a Buddhist scripture, a sutta collection in the Khuddaka Nikaya, part of the Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism. All its suttas, are thought to originate from before the Buddha’s death and consist largely of verse, though some also contain some prose. Some scholars — including Bhikkhu Bodhi — believe that it describes the oldest of all Buddhist practices. Bhikkhu Bodhi,’s book, “In the Buddha’s Words” will be our main course of study for the foreseeable future. This discourse is found in his recently published book “Social and Communal Harmony” and not in “The Buddha’s Words.”