Guided Meditation Day 2

Tara gives brief instructions on the forgiveness practice, then guides us through a process of forgiveness of ourselves and others. “Forgiving is a movement of your heart not to carry aversive hatred or blame. That you can care about someone and still create boundaries… Each of you has this wisdom, heart, being place that intuits that there really isn’t freedom in the moments that you’re carrying blame and judgment.”

Audio recording of Monday Night Meditation class with Matthew Brensilver on May 9th, 2016

Question and Response from Retreat ~ After morning meditation, Tara responds to questions on deepening our meditation practice, working with unpleasant and pleasant thoughts, and forgiveness from the IMCW 2016 Spring Residential Retreat.

Standing can put us in touch with somatic intelligence as: balance, as cohesion. Gradually the felt sense of body re-forms as a mid-line central stillness and as peripheral sensitivities and openness.

Balance is an important aspect of bodily/somatic intelligence. It is alert, free from pressure and sensitive. Attuning to this can bring these qualities into citta.

Our environmental crisis is generated by an obsession with ownership and individualism that obscures the truth of our inter-dependence within a web of life. In a world divided by inequity, racism, and wars, Dharma practice shatters the illusion of dualistic consciousness, offering a new paradigm. This mini-retreat explores the process which generates divisiveness: papanca or conceptual proliferation in service of delusion. The ending of papanca reveals the unshakeable depth and the undivided nature of reality at the heart of all circumstances, revolutionizing our way of being and living — both personally and globally. The retreat, for contemplatives and activists, is framed within depth teachings of emptiness and merciful compassion embodied by Kuan Yin Bodhisattva, who is a metaphor for our deepest, mysterious heart. It includes Dharma teachings, meditation and inquiry sessions, qi-gong, group process, psycho-spiritual exploration, and the cultivation of inner skills for activists. Besides applying the liberating practices and teaching of mindfulness and insight meditation, we will use chanting and ceremony.

Find ground in the body as a gift, not worked for. This opens space around the body. Breathing is another given that flows through that, establishing rhythm = natural time.