Tag: practice
Scenes from a Mindfulness Retreat: Experience
This is the final installment of four. Here are links to the first, second, and third part. It was 6 a.m. on the first morning of the retreat, and after a restless night’s sleep I was sitting on a wooden bench before a still farm pond, examining again my intention for being there. For several [...]
Scenes from a Mindfulness Retreat: Ritual
Here are links to Part One and Part Two. One of the things I’ve admired about the Friday night drop in mindfulness sessions at the UW Health Integrative Medicine Center is the creativity displayed by the teachers in developing rituals, symbolic objects and activities that help to express the wisdom of practice. There is no [...]
Scenes from a Mindfulness Retreat: The Work
Part two of a four-part series. You can read the introduction here. One of the things I think those of you who have been on more traditional retreats would find most unusual about the mindfulness retreat is how interactive it was. There were no long periods of silent meditation, broken by occasional meals, dharma talks [...]
Who Is The Ultimate Authority?
The concept of authority in Buddhism shouldn’t be complicated — yet it is. Many of us are already familiar with the Kalama Sutta‘s talk about how we shouldn’t rely on outside authorities but weigh what we’re told against our own experience. For many here this was one of the first reasons we became interested in [...]
What is a Secular Buddhist, and What Do They Believe?
A few months back I addressed the question we were receiving frequently What is Secular Buddhist Practice? Now, we are seeing stereotypes of secular Buddhists cropping up, and some assumptions about the beliefs or lack thereof regarding secular Buddhists. I’d like to address both those questions in one article, because they tend to roll into each in online conversations.
A Secular Understanding of Dependent Origination: #2 Sankhara
In the last post I offered a fairly plain description of what was meant by “ignorance” in the first link in the chain of dependent arising. It is ignorance of what dukkha is, how it comes about, that it can come to an end, and the way to do that. I said that dukkha is [...]
A Secular Understanding of Dependent Origination: #1 Ignorance
This post is the first in a series of twelve on dependent arising (the translation of paticca samuppada that I prefer over dependent origination, or co-dependent arising, or interdependent origination or any of the other variations). I plan to take each link in the classic chain of twelve and explain — in the plainest language [...]
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