All that we cherish - love, creativity, wisdom and aliveness - becomes available when we come home to an embodied presence. This talk looks at how the two wings of mindfulness and compassion guide us in the midst of difficulty to our inner sanctuary of freedom.

Through stories and practical instruction,s the talk illuminates the direct experience of fear and other challenging emotions and describes the transformation of fear into love through the practices of naming, mindfulness of the body/nervous system, lovingkindness and letting go.

(There is a long pause at the beginning) We complete our exploration of "mature" (or "right") mindfulness, focusing on how mindfulness may be disconnected from wisdom, how it can lead to wisdom, and how "mature" mindfulness is integrated with wisdom (as well as ethics and the awakened heart)

We continue to look at how mindfulness can be understood in the larger context of connection with ethics, wisdom, and the awakened heart. Here we explore how mindfulness and metta can be sometimes seen as separate, but how both practices point to a mature integration-loving awareness, mindful caring, the mindful and wise heart.

In the context of the accelerating application of mindfulness in "secular" settings, we can ask questions about whether mindfulness is sometimes presented as a mere technique. We look at the nature of "nature" or "right mindfulness" (samma sati) and the importance of connecting mindfulness to the awakened heart, wisdom, and to ethics. In this talk, we focus especially on mindfulness and ethics.

Through a greater self understanding brought about through mindfulness, we can live in alignment with anicca, dukka and anatta. Becoming aligned in the New Paradigm allows our frustrations with life to cease arising.

Patience, one of the paramis, is a quality that we don’t often appreciate, even though it is tremendously important in our practice and our lives. To be patient is to be fully present for what is, to be with difficulty and challenge without resistance. Patience allows mindfulness and wisdom to deepen, as we meet our experience without agendas or expectations.

with Susan Kaiser-Greenland

"The aim of my presentation will be to investigate what mindfulness practice is about according to the early Buddhist discourses. These discourses have been preserved in the Pali Nikayas, in the Chinese Agamas, and at times also in Sanskrit fragments and sutra quotations preserved in Tibetan. From a historical viewpoint, these discourses represent the earliest layer of Buddhist textual material and thus take us back as close as possible to the original instructions delivered by the Buddha. In these texts, we find two basic expositions: 1) the fourfold establishment of mindfulness taught in general; 2) the threefold establishment of mindfulness associated with the Buddha himself. First, I will examine the fourfold establishment of mindfulness, based on the way it is depicted in the different extant versions of the Discourse on Mindfulness and the Discourse on Mindfulness of Breathing. Then, I will compare these to the threefold establishment of mindfulness. Through such comparison, I hope to arrive at key aspects of Buddhist mindfulness practice according to the earliest available textual sources at our disposition."

with Susan Kaiser-Greenland

Openness, the willingness to meet what arises, is one of our basic resources as human beings. The ability to open what is pleasant and unpleasant alike, knowing we can benefit, learn from it, gives a certain confidence. Mindfulness of body is our workshop to cultivate that ability to open to and bear with painful feeling. Not resisting or fighting it, just sustaining awareness and knowing it for what it is.

Mindfulness means looking more carefully. As we sustain attention on an object, we can begin to discern how we get caught and how we get free. Body as a foundation for mindfulness can mean mindfulness of breathing in and out, the elements, walking up and down, the unattractive parts, or contemplating a dead body. A review of several of these practices is given.

A reflection on the faculty of energy and how to apply it skillfully. Energy for investigation that leads to wisdom, energy for devotion and aspiration that uplifts the heart, energy for mindfulness of body that results in calm and insight.

We sometimes think that if we are experiencing aversion in our practice, that insight must be out of reach. Yet the Buddha teaches us that the path unfolds through understanding suffering. When we bring mindfulness to aversion itself, the understanding that develops can be very freeing.

These 5 faculties when cultivated and developed merge in the deathless. Faith, energy, concentration, mindfulness, wisdom. These are faculties we all have, but they may be poorly developed. Guidance is given for how to touch into these and strengthen them.

Practicing meditation, we inevitably encounter the wandering mind. Rather than considering this experience to be a "problem", if we explore this phenomenon with mindfulness, we can learn a lot about our minds.

Through mindfulness of the breath and body we can develop the Five Jhana Factors, leading to deeper states of absorption.

The mind of a Buddha is at peace because of the absence of reactivity. Can we discover that place of rest in our own minds? Mindfulness of vedana, the feeling tone of experience, exposes the ways we try to control our experiences from our likes and dislikes. What does it mean to open to the way things are?