The Buddhist Studies courses are designed for people who have attended three or more mindfulness meditation retreats and have a commitment to daily meditation practice. This ongoing program is designed to deepen our understanding through the study and application of the teachings of the Buddha. Classes will include dharma talks, large and small group discussions, and guided sitting time. Participants will be expected to use the teachings as a focus for their daily practice. Led by Mark Nunberg. This six week course is a continuation of our year-long study of the Buddha’s discourse on the four foundations of mindfulness. With mindfulness of the mind, the Buddha invites us to notice whether the mind is with or without greed, anger, or delusion. We can learn to discern whether the mind is contracted and distracted or whether the mind is open and still. Learning to recognize the shape and quality of the mind is the first step toward deepening insight and release.

When mindfulness is based on right view, there is understanding of skillful and unskillful mind-states and the effects they give rise to. Otherwise mindfulness is merely attention. Right mindfulness, established firmly in the body, has the quality of steadiness and stillness, witnessing and non-involvement with phenomena. Mindfulness is about returning to body and breathing – ground, space, center.

Let the Dhamma resonate and support our understanding of our own lives. The encouragement is to come to know it for oneself. Come into body, ground, here, establish mindfulness. Whatever is happening, we have a way of meeting it and coming into right relationship in a way that steadies and frees the heart.

Maintaining mindfulness on sleeping and waking up; relationship between being sensitive and taking things personally; human enhancement and right view; sense is of being a frightened deer – practices for inner sense of security; gathering the good for wandering mindstates.

How we live on the surface – our lifestyle, speech, actions – generates signs and messages received in the depth. Make an effort to establish right view in your daily life. Mindfulness is then established from that message, not in self-view but in the right territory of lovingkindness, compassion, renunciation.

We begin with a review of last week's opening exploration of deepening daily life practice, naming some of the challenges of daily life practice, some initial ways of deepening such practice, and the centrality for such practice of mindfulness of the body. We then, for the rest of the session, explore how we can practice with reactivity when it arises, in its two forms--grasping after the pleasant and pushing away what is taken as unpleasant. We ground such practice in the Buddha's teaching in the model of Dependent Origination of the sequence from contact to feeling-tone to wanting (or not wanting) to grasping (or pushing away). We then point to a number of ways of practicing with reactivity and some of the complexities of such practice, particularly the ways in which reactivity can be enmeshed with discernment. A discussion follows!