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.