Arlington Insight - The Sure Heart's Release

Dear Friends,

My graduate education was based, in part, on the works of Paulo Freire and Myles Horton, who realized that reading, and reading the world, were equally important, and yet required different skills. For me, Dharma practice includes reading the texts, practice methods, etc., and also reading how they come to life in the world, and my own heart.

We had a lovely class last week, experimenting with reading a text four times out loud (thank you to the readers!) and then exploring the meaning of the text, and how it resonates with us in our lives.

The text below is an imaginative folk poem from Sri Lanka, where the woman who raised the Buddha—Gotami, sister to his birth mother Maya—is in conversation with the Buddha to be. Through contemplation of their conversation we can deepen our intuitive understanding of Dharma practice, and it's relationship to life here in the 21st century.

Hope you can join us this evening as we explore the text together.

With much metta, & gratitude for your presence in the world,
Jennifer

For reference—A few methods for reading and exploring texts:
1) Florilegium method of collecting literary bouquets. For example, you might focus on specific nouns, verbs, etc. Other options include gathering allusions, symbols, themes, etc. This focus helps to deepen the emotional relationship and insight into the texts (and Dharma practice).

2) We also used a method where we read the texts aloud as a group four times. The first time we simply related to the narrative meaning of the text. The second time we related to any allegorical or symbolic meanings. The third reading, we related how the texts connected to our world, our own lives, and/or resonances. The fourth reading, we listened with an ear for how, or what, the texts inspire in us in our own lives right now.

3) Imaginative questioning: we invite questions about the texts, the characters, symbols, etc. Emphasis is given to the questions rather than answers.

4) Contemplate two texts having a conversation with each other. What would the dialogue include? Where would it lead? What would it reveal?

Dear Friends,

The greatest benefit to ourselves and all beings is waking up to how things are, and freeing the heart-mind from taṇhā, (aka: thirst, unskillful desire, craving). Ajahn Chah, the Thai Forest Tradition monk, would often remind students and other monks that practice is more important than studying Pali, Sanskrit, or even the texts. There are indeed scholars who know the texts with great expertise but do not practice the Dharma or meditate. They make the tea but never drink it, never take in its nourishment.

This evening, we'll nourish ourselves by continuing to build connection with each other, i.e. cultivating the "Beloved Sangha." We'll dive deeper into the practice with a longer meditation so that we can touch into connectedness, aliveness, stillness, and the qualities of the heart-mind.
We'll also have time for questions and sharing.

Satsang is a Sanskrit word that means "true company." This is a lovely way to deepen practice, continue the exploration of the heart-mind, and learn how others employ the methods of awakening.

I'm setting off for the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies on Tuesday for a short retreat. I'll be teaching again on August 13. No class next week, August 6, while traveling back from retreat.

With much metta, & gratitude for your presence in the world,
Jennifer

image credit: Moco Museum

Dear Friends,

The answers we get are usually dependent on the questions we ask. The shape of our lives depends in part on the questions we ask. Should I take this job? Should I say yes to this relationship? Should I stay, or should I go? What do I need? Am I right or wrong? Am I kind? What is contentment?

Over the years it's become clearer to me that asking questions is central to making progress toward awakening, just as it is for the mundane parts of life. As Thanissaro Bhikkhu says:

The Buddha wasn't the sort of teacher who simply answered questions. He also taught which questions to ask. He understood the power of questions: that they give shape to the holes in your knowledge and force that shape — valid or not — onto the answers you hope will fill up those holes. Even if you use right information to answer a wrong question, it can take on the wrong shape. If you then use that answer as a tool, you're sure to apply it to the wrong situations and end up with the wrong results.

A skillful question will lead onwards to clarity and freedom, whereas asking an unskillful question can lead to confusion, bewilderment, or a dead end. This evening we’ll explore this process of asking questions.

For contemplation

Towards the end of a meditation session, or just throughout the day, it can be helpful to slowly ask yourself one or more of these questions. The answers will come through your heart and an embodied knowing rather than intellectual thought process. Inquiry is meant to take the time it takes—sometimes the embodied answers arrive instantly, other times it can take year.

What am I believing?

What do you think on should do before one dies?

How can I pause throughout the day; what would that be like?
What is happening right now?
How am I relating to what is happening?

What would contentment look like in a moment, a day, in a life?

How do I relate to myself when I disconnect?
What would it be like to connect with my heart?
What would it be like to be more loving, more kind to myself and others?

What am I holding on to?
What do I want to let go of?
What can be let go of?
What do I want to unlearn?

What is important?
What is most important?
How do I devote my energy (or not) to what is most important?

What do I want people to know about me?
What do I want to know about others?

What are my core values?
What are my guiding values?
What would it take to live in accord with my core/guiding values?

Sending much metta & blessings to each,

Jennifer

P.S. See the information below about a wonderful opportunity to practice mindfulness and expression in a hybrid intuitive painting class with experienced teacher and mediator, Meredith McEver. All experience levels welcome!

P.P.S. No class next week.

Dear Friends,

I'd really love to have an international interdependence day. It seems necessary. Humans need each other and the planet.

Many times I've witnessed the power of community/sangha at retreats, and in classes. Whether in silence or speaking, people holding each other with compassion and care is a force that transforms and heals. Never underestimate the power of your acts of kindness. You may or may not see the effects, but know that the energies of kindness are rippling outward to territories beyond your view.

This evening, we'll have an extended practice and also explore our interdependence.

For practice and reflection

Contemplate an act of kindness that you received from a friend/family member, stranger, etc. When you reflect on what happened how do you feel? What were any outcomes from the event? Why do you choose to remember the event?

Contemplate an act of kindness that you performed towards another. How did you feel while doing it? How does it feel when you remember the details of the act―circumstances, your effort, gesture, responses, etc.?

The next time you eat a piece of food, really look at it, experience it with all your senses. Then, contemplate how the food came into being. What role did human ancestors play, as well as farmers, pickers, hybridizers, grocers, etc.? Explore the elements that make up the food―how weather, microbes, insects, etc. contributed to the food coming into being.

Explore the qualities that you appreciate about yourself (e.g. courage, artistic ability, loyalty, curiosity, kindness, wisdom, etc.) How have others contributed to you developing these qualities (these may be people you know or from books, music, etc.)? What is it like to explore how others have helped you become who you are? Who might be helping you cultivate additional qualities at this time? If you like, reach out to them and offer your gratitude.

May your practice be strong and may all dwell in unshakable peace.

With deep bows & much gratitude & metta,
Jennifer

Dear Friends,

Internal mindfulness gets most of the headlines—mindful of our emotions, thoughts, bodily sensations, feeling tone (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral), etc. Yet the Buddha instructed that mindfulness needs to be both internal and external for a balanced awareness. External mindfulness helps us expand our awareness beyond a self-focus to include the world, i.e. "get out of our heads."

When the Buddha instructs us to be internally and externally mindful, he's pointing to the comprehensive nature of mindfulness practice—nothing is left out. When we're mindful in this way, the continuity and momentum of mindfulness is strengthened which helps us live a life that is non-harming to ourselves and others.

Practicing external mindfulness can also help us cultivate lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity as we watch other beings experience, happiness, struggle, success, etc. And because we're social animals, our own composure in practice can end up being a support to others' steadiness of mind and peacefulness.

Tonight, we'll explore ways to practice external mindfulness and its benefits.

For practice and reflection

Choose a location where you can being-watch (people, other animals, etc.). Sit comfortably and establish mindfulness, balance, curiosity, and friendliness in the mind. You might begin by being mindful your own breathing and other bodily sensations. Then after a while, begin to be mindful of the beings around you (without judging them!😅)—their postures, how they are moving, sounds they make, visual appearances, social interactions, their emotions, etc. What is it like to be mindful in this way? How do beings/people react/interact with you, if at all? What do you notice about your emotions, feeling tone, and attitudes during and after the practice? Perhaps plan additional times when you can practice in this way, maybe introducing into your everyday life.

Sit outside, or near a window, perhaps at dawn or sunset, or when a rain shower in approaching, and notice the change in the weather, the light from the sun, other beings' behaviors and attitudes, etc. How are they reacting to the changing weather, light, temperature? What do you notice?

Happiness to Dads & Grads!! Blessings of the Solstice to all!

May your practice be strong and may all dwell in unshakable peace.

Much metta,
Jennifer

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Sunday classes will continue to meet on

Dear Friends,

There is a passage in the Anguttara Nikāya (4.45) that moves me deeply because the Buddha himself reassures us that we have everything we need for awakening right here, right now, in our fathom-long body:

"...Yet it is just within this fathom-long body, with its perception & intellect, that I declare that...there is an end to dukkha" (aka: unsatisfactoriness, suffering, bummer. etc.).

How wonderful to be reassured that our bodies, perception, and intellect are not enemies, but when skillfully recruited and applied, are helpmates, in our quest to live fully, and fully awaken.

Tonight, we'll explore ways to appreciate the body itself, it's natural ability to be a meditation anchor, a place where we can rest the heart-mind, as well as a doorway to liberation.

For practice and reflection

Experiment with setting the intention to rest the mind on the body. The body only exists in the present moment, so choosing the breath, or other bodily sensations can help keep the mind anchored in the present moment.
While in meditating, direct awareness to the changing qualities of sensations of breath and/or other bodily sensations. Do you best to feel them, not watch them. Embody the sensations from the inside out. What do you notice about change, impermanence?
In daily life, choose an activity where you notice the changing qualities of the body. For example, if you chop vegetables, notice your posture (standing/sitting), the orientation of your arms, the weight of the knife in the hand, the force needed to cut, raising the arm and hand again for the next cut. Repeat. What do you notice? What is the quality of the mind in the beginning, middle, and ending of this activity? How do you experience change during the activity?
As you are getting into bed at night, notice the flow of the body as it moves from "out of bed posture" to lying down in bed posture." What is this process like?
If it appeals to you, experiment how food is eaten, fuels the body, and then the non-necessary parts are excreted, perhaps contemplating how the body is a changing record of all that we've eaten.

May your practice be strong and may all dwell in unshakable peace.

Much metta,
Jennifer

Dear Friends,

Yesterday, I attended a celebration of life gathering for beloved friend and former IMCW Board member, Phyllis Smolkin, who died in March. Listening to loved ones speak about their relationship with her, it was clear that she was an amazing mother to her beloved daughters, and to so many others. She was a steadying force on my early meditation retreats, and healing presence after the death of my own mother. Mothering energy flowed from her, nurturing this world, both human and nonhuman. The purity of her heart and actions are rare in this world. May her goodness continue to resonate outward. The meditation hall seems very empty without her.

The Buddha himself recognized the importance of this mothering archetype. He (and other monks, for that matter) used the mothering archetype to convey certain ideas about practice. Most famously, in the Metta Sutta, the Buddha invokes the protective quality of a mother:

Just as a mother would watch over her
child—her one and only child—with her life,
In just the same way develop a mind
Unbounded toward all living creatures.

This is the protecting, fierce compassion side of the mothering archetype. There is of course, the soothing, caring, and nurturing side. Mothers and women run the gamut in the suttas—from deluded and evil, to wise and awakened. In truth, mothering is a part of all of us. Hopefully we, regardless of s*x or gender identity, can skillfully embody the mothering archetype indicated in the Metta Sutta, and in other suttas where women awoke through their suffering.

Because it's Mother's Day, we'll explore the mothering archetype this evening, and how all of us can cultivate its wholesome aspects.

Please join us tonight for practice, exploration, and discussion.

Questions for contemplation:

What does it mean to be caring and compassionate in my relationship with others? With myself?
How do I soothe myself and others?
Does the protective mothering archetype arise easily, or not; does the context matter? When it does arise, how does it express itself?
What is my relationship with my the mothering archetype?
When does the unskillful mother arise? How do I relate to it?

Happy Mother's Day to all!

May all be safe and protected, free from inner and outer harm.
May all dwell in unshakable peace.

Holding all in the heart of compassion,
Jennifer

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Sunday classes will continue to meet online.

Dear Friends,

In our lives we often expect certain things to make us happy—relationships, work, play, hobbies, sensual pleasures, a certain mental disposition, but is that what happiness is?

How do you know when you’re happy? How do you know when you’re unhappy? Is one of these better than the other? As with most things in Dharma practice, it depends on where you’re at—i.e. the conditions or the ground you’re standing on, as it were.

The Buddha counseled: “One should know how to judge what happiness is; having known how to judge what happiness is, one should be intent on inward happiness” [M.L. III. 278]. One hint is that the most powerful forms of happiness include both mindfulness and equanimity.

This Sunday, we’ll begin investigating what happiness is, its many forms, and how these many forms can help or hinder us in achieving the highest happiness—the sure heart’s release—full awakening.

May all be free from inner and outer harm.
May all dwell in unshakeable peace.

Much metta,
Jennifer

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Sunday classes will continue to meet online.

Dear Friends,

Few people like to be held in the bo***ge of tyranny (aka oppression, dictatorship, domination, etc.), and yet all of us submit to the tyranny of taṇhā when we’re not in a wholesome mind state. Taṇhā is a Pali word that is often translated as thirst, clinging/craving/attachment/unskillful desire. Taṇhā expresses in the thirst for sensual pleasures in particular, and also in the thirst to be “somebody” as well as the thirst "not to be” anybody (h/t Will Shakespeare on that one).

As Joseph Goldstein said to me during an interview, "craving is what keeps samsara going”—samsara being the world of craving and ignorance we create and wander in.

What would it be like to be free from this tyranny, this wandering? The whole of the Dharma is leading to that freedom. It's a long path, but by practicing Dharma, and sharing our insights with each other, that path can be enjoyable, and perhaps shorter.

Tonight, we'll explore taṇhā, ways to notice it, it’s crafty methods, and how to unhook from it. It is possible!

For Contemplation
During your next meditation, count the number of times you notice thirst, clinging, craving, or sensual desire. (See if you can do this exploration with a sense of curiosity, and maybe even playfulness!!) What are the feelings, sensations, thoughts, and emotions that were present just before you found yourself attached/hooked into something (ideas, emotions, things, etc.)? Were there any moments where you noticed craving was about to arise, but you prevented it from arising? Did you ever abandon/let go of the clinging/thirst/craving/desire after it had arisen? How did cling(s) change or fade away?
Set aside 2-3 hours (or more) to notice the pull of clinging/thirst/craving/sensual desire in daily life. What are the most subtle cravings you notice? What are the most obvious cravings? What was your response to yourself when noticing that you have cravings? How did you respond to the cravings themselves?
Experiment with generating wholesome mind states. For example, you might list the number of ways you can be generous with people you know, as well as "strangers." Act on them if appropriate. Experiment with generating a mind state of friendliness, goodwill, and/or compassion. What do you notice about clinging, thirst, etc. when you have been cultivating wholesome mind states?
How might wise restraint alter the course of a day in your life?

UPDATES:
Trisha Stotler, Jeff Rosenberg, and I will be teaching the IMCW Spring Retreat: Intimacy With Life, Saturday, April 15, 04:00 pm - Friday, April 21, 12:00 pm. For more information, click here. In person and online options available.

The UUCA in Arlington Monday in-person class is going well. The schedule, topics, and teachers are on the IMCW website.

May all be free from inner and outer harm.
May all dwell in unshakeable peace.

Blessings to all,
Jennifer
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Sunday classes will continue to meet online.

Dear Friends,

If our lives allow it, we might sit in meditation for an hour or two each day. But what about the other 22 or 23 hours?! A while back, I was standing at an intersection, waiting for the walk sign, and then I looked up at the gray sky and thought―this is it, right now; what am I experiencing? What is the quality of my heart? I don't need to wait for anything. I can connect with my feeling of wanting to get somewhere, planning mind, and my heart right now. A huge wave of contentment and happiness washed through me. This has been my practice for decades. Stopping. Noticing what is true, and allowing the experience to wash through me, and connecting with the heart-mind.

As Charlotte Joko Beck said: With unfailing kindness, your life always presents what you need to learn. Whether you stay home or work in an office or whatever, the next teacher is going to pop right up.

That teacher might be on a street corner, right next to you. So why wait for some idea of a perfect time to practice?

This evening we will explore ways to practice the Dharma on a street corner, in the car, in an office chair, in the presence of another, at a computer, wherever you find yourself.

For Contemplation
Set a timer to prompt you at random intervals throughout the day. When the timer rings, pause, and ask yourself: 1. What is happening in this moment; 2. What is the feeling tone―pleasant, unpleasant, neither pleasant nor unpleasant (neutral); and 3. How am I relating to the moment―e.g, judging self or others, resisting, accepting, controlling mode, memories, fantasies, etc.; 4. What is the quality of the heart at that moment?
How do you relate to being mindful of the ordinary? Does how you relate change, as the context changes?
Plan 1-2 minute meditation sessions three times during the day for a week, and/or a month. What do you notice? What insights arise?
How might you unknot habits that you see? What would be encouraging/helpful to you, as you develop skillful habits?
How might these experiments be a teacher for you?

May all be free from inner and outer harm.
May all dwell in unshakeable peace.

Blessings to all,
Jennifer
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Sundays classes will continue to meet online.

Dear Friends,

A number of years ago, I had a feeling and wasn't sure how to label it. At first, I thought is was loneliness. It was an ache in the heart, as if something was missing. After a while, I realized it was longing, the longing to let go, to be fully awake. Surprisingly, I felt a tremendous release with this clarity. The insight enabled me to energize my practice and have a sense of ease at the same time (while also remaining a compassionate mess!).

Longing can appear as an ache in the heart, or a hard to define feeling of wanting-yet-not-wanting. Exploring the feeling and using inquiry, are key, for wisdom to emerge. Skillful longing in the realm of Dhamma practice can be a guide. It can tell us when we're offtrack or need more support. It can help us to make a move that may not have be in the forefront of our thoughts and plans. Sometimes just knowing what is dear to our hearts is enough to change the dynamic of practice, and life.

This evening we'll explore skillful longing and practice inquiry.

For Contemplation
1. What does your heart long for? The first time you ask this question you're likely to get surface level answers (which is fine and can be instructive!). Continue to gently ask this question, with the intention of letting wisdom emerge, or arise, in its own time. Also notice how the body and heart-mind feel as you explore.
2. There is no second contemplation. #1 is it! 😅

UPDATE:
This Monday, in-person classes relaunch at UUCA in Arlington. I'll be teaching tomorrow night, along with Satyani McPherson and Stig Regli. The weekly schedule is on the class page. This is a hybrid class, i.e., in-person and via Zoom. The new system for classes require that you "subscribe." Dana is optional; you can register without dana by choosing $0.00 as an amount. Masks are required. Looking forward to being with anyone who can attend!

May all be free from inner and outer harm.
May all dwell in unshakeable peace.

Blessings to all,
Jennifer
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We'll continue to meet online for the time being.

Dear Friends,

While I'm with my dad this weekend, Jeff Rosenberg will be guest teaching on Sunday.

Jeff writes: Generosity is highly valued in Buddhist practice. And, as challenging as that practice might be, many of us struggle (even more) with receiving.
And then what happens when we are both the giver AND receiver? What if we need something, and yet feel we don’t deserve it? We will explore this tonight looking, in part, as what the Buddhist teachings have to say.

May all be safe and protected, free from inner and outer harm.
May all dwell in unshakeable peace.

Blessings to all,
Jennifer