Posts Tagged ‘compassion’
Practice Circle: The Benefactor Body Scan
Recently, SBA Community Director Jennifer Hawkins engaged us with folks from the North American Buddhist Alliance to talk about the body scan, a practice used widely in both Buddhist meditation and mindfulness programs. If you’re not familiar with it, it consists of systematically directing your concentrated awareness to one body part at a time, starting…
Read MorePractice Circle: Keeping Your Practice Together
I won’t bore you with the details, but 2017 has been a tough year for me. Job loss, unemployment, an auto accident, the stress of adjusting to a demanding new job, physical injury, and more — it’s all come one after another. Dukkah, thick and fast. And, just as I needed my practice the most,…
Read MorePractice Circle: Stay Close to Your Resentment
One of the interesting things about working with the Tibetan Lojong slogans is the way they so often seem strangely counterintuitive. The slogan we’ll be working with this week at Practice Circle is a good example: “Stay Close to Your Resentment.” What? As good Buddhists, aren’t we supposed to be releasing our clinging to illusory…
Read MorePractice Circle: Make Practice Your Whole Life
Those of you who have joined us at Practice Circle lately know that we have been working with the Tibetan Lojong text, fifty-nine slogans that present seven points of training the mind. There have been countless commentaries on the Lojong text; the one we’ve been working with is Norman Fischer’s wonderful Training in Compassion: Zen…
Read MorePractice Circle: The Antidote to Hatred
In this world Hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, Ancient and inexhaustible. Dhammapada As a mother watches over her child, willing to risk her own life to protect her only child, so with a boundless heart should one cherish all living beings, suffusing the whole world with unobstructed…
Read MoreCompassion and Emptiness in Early Buddhist Meditation: A Review
Having experienced for myself the difficulty of understanding Gotama’s teachings on both compassion and emptiness based on a reading of the Nikaya texts, I was excited to see Anālayo’s new book, Compassion and Emptiness in Early Buddhist Meditation. The book comes out in print in October 2015, but is available now in a Kindle edition.…
Read MorePractice Circle: Transforming Suffering with Compassion
As I sit down to write this, the late afternoon shadows have deepened nearly to evening, reminding me that the longest nights of the year will soon be upon us. The news is full of the angry protests over police violence and the systematic atrocities committed by the United States government in its program of…
Read MorePractice Circle: Finding Your Benefactors
For the last several months, the mindfulness group I practice with has been learning a set of meditation practices adapted by John Makransky from Tibetan dzogchen and mahamudra methods. Although these techniques have much in common with the mindfulness practices adapted from Theravada Buddhism, such as vipassana and loving kindness meditation, there are some differences in emphasis…
Read MorePractice Circle: Tonglen for the Winter Solstice
This week’s Practice Circle coincides with the weekend of the Winter Solstice, the darkest and coldest time of the year for those of us in the northern hemisphere (mudita to our Aussie and Kiwi friends!) I don’t know about you, but I always have a tangible felt sense of entropy about now. The cold and…
Read MoreWhat is Metta?
With good will for the entire cosmos, Cultivate a limitless heart: Above, below, & all around, Unobstructed, without hostility or hate Whether standing, walking, Sitting, or lying down, As long as one is alert, One should be resolved on this mindfulness. This is called a sublime abiding, here and now. This is from Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s…
Read More