Engaged and Aware: Finding a Balance

For many of us, commitment to justice and ethics leads us to engage in action in the real world. But our practice of meditative awareness calls us to “be” not just “do.” Are these impulses opposed to each other? Or are they mutually supportive? How can we sustain our engagement and connect our mindfulness to the suffering all around (and within!) us? Let’s explore the implications of bringing our practice into every day life.

Audio Player

If you would like to download this talk, please right click and select “save as” here.

Depends on What?: An Exploration of Causes and Conditions

You may have heard about the importance of “causes and conditions” but what does that mean to our practice in formal meditation and daily life? Can we learn to recognize how causes and conditions work in our lives experientially without making it into an intellectual analysis? What would it be like to know a peace that does not depend on outside circumstances?

Rich Howard will lead this evening exploring the practical application of the Buddhist understanding of conditionality. As a start, notice how the experience of finding a parking place near the Friends’ Meeting House affects your mood!
Audio Player

If you would like to download this talk, please right click and select “save as” here

Nature is a seamless whole, flowing and changing continuously. The world we inhabit is increasingly digital, measured, quantified, and reduced to numbers and words. How do you think of your practice? Minutes on the cushion? Days in retreat? Years of practice? Or does the practice flow through every waking moment? We spend this evening examining our view of practice as analog or digital. We  ask ourselves if it makes a difference. We think about our own practice and discuss how it might be digital, analog, neither, or both. And how that serves our life and the world.

Audio Player

If you would like to download this talk, please right click and select “save as” here