Winter Retreat – Morning Reflection, 7 Jan 2022
With mindfulness of breathing, subtle beneficial signs are picked up and suffused into the body. We can relinquish the signs we’ve picked up from the concrete jungle, the fear, the dread, the lack of heartfulness; we can purify the internal environment. Refer to what’s beautiful, uplifting, noble and generous. With mindfulness of breathing you’re taking in these messages.
Winter Retreat – Morning Reflection, 6 Jan 2022
We all participate in this generated ‘me’ experience, which is of being ‘in here’ afflicted by the world ‘out there’. But we can come to understand this scenario as conditions with causes and effects. We can cultivate the basis for contentment, for love, tolerance, acceptance, gladness. There is a Path.
Notice the web of conditions we all share, connections we take for granted – we are not separate from that, we are that weave. The decent human response is to cultivate virtue and goodwill, develop wisdom; such skillful causes and conditions purify the heart. This is the kamma that leads to the end of kamma. Connection to Dhamma via spiritual friendship leads out of suffering. It’s important to recognize such connectivity as a skillful quality, not a bondage.
Establish mindfulness with the experience of a feeling body, the most fundamental source of feeling. Use a wide form of attention that covers the whole body. As phenomena are changing the mind is still with receptivity and deep listening. The nature of sati doesn’t react to feeling. The feeling can be felt, without blaming, criticizing or getting involved. When feeling isn’t given any more food, it becomes more equanimous.
We become entangled in the creations and reactions that arise based on ignorance. Mindfulness immersed in the body is where we can experience release from the powerful reflexes and currents. Translate the complexities of thoughts into the simplicity of emotional drives, and feel them in the body. Tune into what’s given – awareness, presence, stability – this is comfortable, this is pleasure, this is our basic ground.
Over this winter Nick Scott will be reading In My Teacher’s Footsteps, the account of how Ajahn Amaro, he and four others followed Ajahn Sumedho to Mount Kailash in Tibet.
No pilgrimage is harder or more ancient than the journey up and over the Himalayan defile to circle Mount Kailash in Tibet. Ajahn Sumedho wanted to do it as a young American in 1950’s California, but only got the opportunity when he was a famous Buddhist monk, aged 60. Nick Scott trained him in European mountains and here recounts his teacher’s attempts, the dire results, and Nick’s own subsequent pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain, with Ajahn Amaro, which nearly killed him. This is a book about adversity, how to face it and what can be gained. But it’s more than that. It’s about the whole journey: life and how to use it, and its difficulties, to find freedom from suffering.
You can start listening here: https://whereareyougoing.podbean.com/