Dharma Talk and Meditation Podcast

Tonight's topic is the third foundation, which is the mind, our brains, how to bring mindfulness to what your brain is doing, what kind of thoughts are arising, what kind of attitude the mind has. Whether the mind is experiencing wisdom or ignorance. For many people it's one of the things that really sets Buddhist meditation apart and mindfulness apart from a lot of other meditations.

How much do you believe your thoughts? What’s your relationship with your mind? If your mind played music, what kind of music would it play? What’s your mind like? What’s the tendency of your mind?

#AgainstTheStream #Buddhist #Meditation

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So for a topic tonight: your relationship to pleasant, unpleasant and neutral. Just thinking about these three feeling tones. Maybe there's somebody here who you know, joining us tonight, who feels like actually pleasance is quite hard to tolerate…

What’s your relationship to positive, negative and neutral experiences? What are you drawn to, pleasure, pain or neutrality? What's more difficult for you?

#AgainstTheStream #Buddhist #Meditation

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Tonight I'm going to do a little bit on this mindfulness of the body, becoming mindful of the four elements in the body and then we're going to do a meditation. It's called a charnel ground meditation or a corpse meditation, where we reflect on the impermanent nature of the body. Then we'll have some discussion about death.

What’s your relationship like with death? When’s the last time you experienced death? How do you relate to the fact that your body is only going to live so long?

#AgainstTheStream #Buddhist #Meditation

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Tonight I'm going to continue what I started last week and probably will do the next few weeks. It's the Satipatthana, the four foundations of mindfulness the way they chant it, as they practice it in the monastery.

What’s your favorite part of your body? What’s the part of your body that you have the most difficulty with? What are the parts that you don’t really want to be mindful of? What’s your favorite part and why?

#AgainstTheStream #Buddhist #Meditation

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Tonight I'm going to start what will turn into several weeks series on mindfulness, the seventh factor of the Eightfold Path and the primary meditation technique that the Buddha taught and encouraged for freeing ourselves.

Freeing ourselves from the causes of suffering. Mindfulness, present time inquiring with an attitude of friendliness or kindness, meta loving kindness attitude.

What is your direct experience right now?

#AgainstTheStream #Buddhist #Meditation

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I’ve gotten some sh*t for saying this in the past, but I haven't learned.

Some of Martin Luther King's views and politics, I believe, are inspired by Buddhism. One time I gave a Dharma talk that MLK was a Buddhist, and then I got a whole bunch of sh*t about it, because he was very much a Christian. But a lot of his politics in civil rights and in fighting ignorance and oppression were influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent approach to creating change.

What’s some of the craziest sh*t your mind does? What does your mind tell you?

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I'm going to talk a bit about the Buddha's first noble truth, that the beginning of the path to freedom starts by acknowledging and turning towards becoming fully aware and breaking any shred of denial that we might have about our suffering, about the dukkha, about the sorrow, the grief, the sadness, the loneliness, the afflictive emotions that we experience as humans. As well as all of the loss and the sadness and difficulty, the difficult situation that we're all born into.

What kind of sorrow have you experienced in your life? In the world? About yourself?

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I feel like the core of what I'm going to talk about tonight is Sangha, it's community and the importance of drawing near and sustaining connections with Sangha. With people who are wise, or at least trying, attempting to be wise and have the intention to be wise.

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So I don't have a have a Dharma talk really for tonight. I'll share a couple of reflections. Last week I was in Thailand for the second time in a month, just a short trip. I went out there with my friend Russ, who's here in the room tonight, to interview Ajahn Amaro who's been one of my core teachers. He's a Buddhist monk, he's an English guy who's a Buddhist monk for like 40 something years…

What comes up for you around the holidays? Do you love it? Do you hate it? Do you bring your practice into it?

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Tonight I'm going to talk about the reality of the suffering in the world and the suffering of existence. Why life is not easy and pleasant and why people aren't wise and compassionate.

What is it that you find most difficult of existence? Why aren’t you happy all the time? Why aren’t you at peace? What gets in your way of joy?

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The topic tonight is about love and loving ourselves. A core part of what the Dharma is teaching us is to love ourselves and each other. 

Do you love yourself? What do you love about yourself? Something that I love about myself is ____. 

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Tonight I'm going to talk about maladaptive strategies. It's that strategy that's like, well, it feels really good when I do it, but I know it's creating negative karma for me because I'm lying or stealing or cheating. I love lying and stealing and cheating. It feels so good.  But I know that in the long run, it's an unhealthy behavior. In the long run, it destroys my fucking life.

What’s something that you do that brings you temporary relief but is bad for you in the long run? Some things that you do that feel good but you know aren’t good for you? 

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I'm going to talk about how  Buddhism, the Buddhist teachings and this path that we call the middle path, is meant to be practiced in every aspect of our life. Our mindful awareness, intention to be kind, sexuality, our relationships, our relationship to money, our relationship to work, responsibility,  our relationship to the world, politics, all the intention is that we bring this practice and these wisdom perspectives to every single aspect of our life. 

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I don't really have a topic topic tonight. I'm just going to do a Q and A. I'm not going to do a full Dharma talk, but we’ll be reflecting on what you understand of Buddhism so far.  Maybe some people are pretty new to Buddhism, but reflecting on what you do know of Buddhism.  Is there anything that you know about Buddhism that doesn't quite  fit or that you kind of have questions about?  Like, the common one is, “is reincarnation really true?”

What do you know about Buddhism so far? Is reincarnation really true? What do you find challenging to believe?

#AgainstTheStream #Buddhist #Meditation

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Living with impermanent experiences

I'm gonna to focus on the Buddhist teaching on non attachment, letting go. The teaching of accepting the impermanent nature of all things and trying to see how much suffering we create for ourselves when we cling or get attached. Also, the antidotes to the suffering that is based in attachment is letting go or letting things be impermanent rather than trying to create permanent structures out of that which is constantly changing.

What is something you’d like to let go of? 

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Death with Noah Levine

Impermanence Of This Body

So tonight the topic for exploration, meditation, and, discussion is death. We talk a lot about impermanence and the Buddha had a lot of teachings about death. So we're gonna talk about death tonight, our relationship to death and the importance of having a relationship with the reality of these temporary nests of our lives and of the lives of everyone that we know and care about. The reality on this planet that we don't last all that long.

What is this body? How do you feel about dying? Do you talk about death? Is it on your radar? 

#AgainstTheStream #Buddhist #Meditation

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Suffering with Noah Levine

Tonglen Meditation

Tonight I'm gonna talk a lot about suffering, the first noble truth. We're gonna do a Tibetan meditation tonight called Tonglen. We’ll breathe in the suffering and breathe out compassion. Developing an attitude of friendliness and care, warmth and mercy, compassion towards pain. Our pain and each other's pain and the pain/suffering in the world.

What are you suffering about today?

#AgainstTheStream #Buddhist #Meditation

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Forgiveness is not, it's not really all that directly taught by the Buddha in the Metta Sutta, there's a few lines on forgiveness.

The Buddha says “in order to really have loving kindness, we have to free ourselves from ill will. Let none despise any being in any state”. So this is a instruction… Just for a moment reflecting on how many people you actually despise. That's maybe not the way you think about it, but think of the people you judge, that you resent, that you wouldn't mind if they didn't exist…

What does this topic of forgiveness bring up for you?

#AgainstTheStream #Buddhist #Meditation

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Tonight I'm going to talk about equanimity, which is a balancing to compassion. The whole goal of Buddhism is to learn to end suffering, not to add to it, not to compound it, but to end it. The whole teaching of the four truths and the eightfold path is this is how we can end our suffering. Compassion is central, caring, loving, kindness, generosity, it's all central to the teaching.

How do you deal with the suffering in your life and in the world? 

#AgainstTheStream #Buddhist #Meditation

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Compassion is a central aspect of what the Buddha's path to liberation entails. Without compassion, there's certainly no freedom, certainly no happiness. It's a necessary skill that we have to develop. It's a radical one. It’s not a decision we can make. We actually have to retrain our minds. We rewire our nervous system in some ways to experience compassion, especially when it comes to ourselves.

What is it like to receive compassion from someone else? Do you like that when someone cares about you or does it feel a little too intimate? How has your compassion grown since you started meditating? Are you more open to empathizing?

#AgainstTheStream #Buddhist #Meditation

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