Gathering and steading attention with body, breath, and sounds.

This Dhamma talk, Guided Meditation and Q&A was offered on July 13th, 2024 for East Bay Dhamma.

Short Reflection & Guided Meditation | Earthworm Practice for the Anthropocene II | Online Wednesday-Mornings

These recordings are available publicly from a retreat held in person at Big Bear Retreat Center. Learn more about the center and upcoming offerings for retreats in nature, gathered in community. bigbearretreatcenter.org/upcoming-retreats/ Healing the Self, Loving the Self, Forgetting the Self Matthew Brensilver July 9 - 13, 2024 Co-sponsored by Insight Retreat Center (IRC) and Big Bear Retreat Center In this silent retreat, we explore how mindfulness supports the healing of the self. Many of the Buddhist teachings help us to tend to painful memory, old pains and the habits that compound suffering. As we become more gentle and loving towards experience, the self becomes less and less of a preoccupation. The more completely we accept ourselves, the easier it becomes to forget the self and rest in an awareness unencumbered by self-consciousness. This retreat includes sitting and walking meditation instructions, and dharma talks.

A central way to describe our practice is to say that we aim to touch and deepen in wisdom and in the awakened heart (particularly through cultivating the “divine abodes”: lovingkindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity), and to live and act increasingly from wisdom and the awakened heart. This is like the well-known image of the teachings and practices being like the bird with two wings—wisdom and compassion (the latter signifying the different qualities of the awakened heart). In the talk, we cover five areas exploring particularly how we connect wisdom and the awakened heart: (1) the aspiration to grow in wisdom and the awakened heart and the nature of wisdom and the awakened heart; (2) our social conditioning (including gender conditioning) about wisdom and the heart and how they can be separate in our lives or one or both may be relatively undeveloped; (3) some ways that they seem separate even in Buddhist teachings and practices, particularly in how metta has sometimes been understood; (4) how to have from different teachings of the Buddha a deeper sense of wisdom and the awakened heart as connected and integrated; and (5) how we might integrate the two in our practices, particularly focusing on the practices we explored in the guided meditation. The talk is followed by discussion.