Without compassion what do you do with your pain? How do you naturally respond to your pain without meditation?

Buddhist meditation says through mindfulness of pain, turning towards pain and seeing that our natural tendency is to push it away or avoid it or replace it, we can begin to get intimate with our own pain and then learn mercy, compassion and forgiveness towards our own minds, our own hearts and our own bodies.

Finding the balance of independence and healthy dependence. Ultimately the dharma is something that we embody, that we experience directly, and in understanding the teachings and how to apply them we find independence. Once finding independence we may no longer need guidance, but we still need each other, so we work to find the balance of independence and health dependence. We come to the Sangha looking for like-minded people to develop a healthy dependence with on the path to complete independence.

Everyone has their own karma that they are fully responsible for.

A core message of Buddhism is that you have to do your own work - be compassionate, be loving, be generous - but remember that everyone has to do their own work.

Developing equanimity allows us to be compassionate towards others pain without taking on the responsibility to fix or change it.

How to meet pleasure with non-attached appreciation.

It is counter to our natural tendencies to meet our own experience with non-attached appreciation and to really meet other people's happiness with empathetic connection. It's not natural, right? This whole thing that we're trying to do is so radical. It's why the Buddha said this whole path goes against the norm, against the stream.

The Heart Practices with Noah Levine - Compassion

We develop compassion by first setting our intention to try. It likely won’t come easy, so we must commit to continuing to try and slowly developing compassion as a new skill or tool.

The untrained heart & mind hates pain. It is counter-instinctual to have compassion for our pain, but mindfulness helps us wake up to how we are feeling and there for respond more wisely - with more compassion.

Metta is the practice of Loving Kindness.

In this meditation and dharma talk Noah discusses the importance of learning to train your mind to concentrate and how we can use the heart practices, the Brahma Viharas, as an object of concentration by choosing to repeat the phrases over and over.

Eightfold Path Eighth Factor - Concentration

The importance of concentration and the difference between mindfulness & concentration. Concentration can bring temporary relief to the human experience, but when we are no longer concentrating how do we find freedom?

The Buddha found that concentration on its own would not lead to full liberation, but understood that the ability to concentrate when mixed with the ability to have open awareness has more precision to see reality and to respond wisely.

Eightfold Path Seventh Factor - Mindfulness

There are four foundations of mindfulness. In this talk Noah will discuss the fourth foundation - Mindfulness of the Truth.

Eightfold Path Seventh Factor - Mindfulness

There are four foundations of mindfulness. In this talk Noah will discuss the third foundation - Awareness of the Mind.

When we bring awareness to the mind we are able to see the repetitive nature of our thoughts and how often we are stuck in craving, planning, past, or future. The goal is to become intimate with the habits of the mind in order to gain wisdom and change your relationship to those repetitive thoughts.

Eightfold Path Seventh Factor - Mindfulness

There are four foundations of mindfulness. In this talk Noah will discuss the second foundation - Feeling Tone.

The experience of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. For the majority of us pleasant and unpleasant are the common feeling tones, and because of this, neutrality can feel really foreign and uncomfortable.

When we begin to label our experiences in this way we can begin to see that our perception of an experience has a lot of control over how we feel about it.

Eightfold Path Seventh Factor - Mindfulness

The Buddha found that the path to awakening was through mindfulness. Mindfulness asks us to turn towards and look at the mind, rather than ignore it or concentrate our thoughts away.

Mindfulness reveals the impersonal and impersonal nature of our human experience.

There are four foundations of mindfulness. In this talk Noah will discuss the first foundation and cover the other three over the next few weeks.

Eightfold Path Sixth Factor - Effort

How much effort are you putting in and is that effort being put in the right place?

It takes a middle path of effort to reach freedom from suffering. We must be relaxed, yet engaged.

The Buddha said that there are four kinds of effort - The effort to avoid, the effort to overcome, the effort to develop, and the effort to maintain or turning towards.

Eightfold Path Fifth Factor - Right Livelihood

The fifth factor prompts you to ask yourself - Am I creating negative karma for myself with how I earn money? Does how I earn money cause harm to myself or others?

Eightfold Path Fourth Factor - Right Action

In order to get free there are some changes we will need to make, some action that will need to be taken. T

he path to Right Action is structured by the Five Precepts:

1. Abstain from killing

2. Abstain from stealing or taking what is not freely offered

3. Abstain from sexual misconduct

4. Abstain from lying

5. Abstain from intoxicants (drugs and alcohol)

Eightfold Path Third Factor - Communication & Right Speech

The three aspects of wrong speech - unskillful speech - ways that we create negative karma for ourselves with our communications are gossiping, harsh speech, and dishonesty.

How often in a conversation with another are you talking about someone who is not present? How often are you using your language in an intentionally harsh way with the intention of causing harm. How often are you omitting the truth, exaggerating, minimizing, or rewriting the story to better serve you.

Eightfold Path Second Factor - Intention

This Buddhist path of mindfulness is the key to changing our actions, to changing our intentions, and our relationship to our mind. The action of responding to what's happening, both internal and external is how we get free.

You decide what your intention is and the big picture, how free do you wanna be?

Eightfold Path First Factor - Understanding

Awareness and understanding are ultimately what will allow us to change our relationship to our present time experiences and end the cycles of craving and suffering.

The first part is understanding the Four Truths. As we gain this understanding we begin to see ourselves and our experiences through the lens of the Four Truths.

Finally, understanding that it's really quite simple - You're either attached or nonattached, you're either clinging and craving or not.

The Eightfold Path - An Overview The Eightfold Path can be broken down into three sections - Meditation, ethics, and wisdom.

Meditation includes mindfulness and concentration based meditations, the heart practices - compassion, forgiveness, loving kindness.

Ethics is the renunciation of creating negative karma for ourselves. The intention to not cause harm to ourselves or each other.

Wisdom is understanding the reality that we live in and trying to be in harmony with the reality of impermanence.

The Third Noble Truth is Nibbana, which can be translated as removing from the fire. It is the extinguishing of that which has been burning us.

When we hold on to things that are impermanent, when we cling, when we are self-centered we get burned. Nibbana is freedom, Nibbana is learning to live life on life’s terms so that you can enjoy the human reality without making it worse.

When we reach Nibbana we are able to say - Right now it’s like this and it’s super unpleasant AND I am totally at ease with it.