Tag: weekly practice
Strategies of Secular Buddhist Practice
As Ted Meissner and Mark Knickelbine have been emphasizing, practice is an essential part of any Secular Buddhist path. But it took me quite awhile to find my way to a really worthwhile practice. For many years I followed a Zen-based form of what I would term ‘free form’ meditation, oriented around samādhi, or focus [...]
Weekly Practice (Dukkha, or Suffering)
We’ve covered a lot of ground in these Weekly Practices, and now you should have a good idea of what mindfulness and concentration are and how meditation develops both. We’ve also looked closely at the impermanence of everything, including the five aggregates that we tend to mistake for a static self. Lastly, we took a good look at craving and attachment.
This week we’ll examine dukkha, often translated as suffering. Dukkha is also the third mark of existence and the subject of the noble truths.
Weekly Practice (Clinging & Craving)
Over the past few weeks, we focused on exploring how the feeling of me, mine, and I arise from the five aggregates: body, feeling tone, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. Each of these arise as a part of the human condition. In fact, they’ve been necessary to our evolution as a species. Without a feeling of I, you might not bother to feed yourself.
The problems of the aggregates comes from not recognizing them as the processes that go into the making of a perception of self, not recognizing that these are impermanent, and the focus for this week, how we cling to them and crave for more.
Weekly Practice (Not Self & Review)
If you’ve been following along each week, first with impermanence, then with mindfulness and concentration, and then with body and feelings, and lastly with mental formations, you may have caught on to the repeated question, “Is this thought, feeling, body sensation, emotional reaction a solid, unchanging self?”
Weekly Practice (5 Aggregates: Mental Formations)
This week we’ll examine the last three aggregates: Perception, Fabrication, and Consciousness. All three of these are mental formations, what the mind does.
Weekly Practice (5 Aggregates: Feeling & Body)
By now, in meditation, you may be seeing that focusing on the breath increases concentration, and noticing whatever arises to interrupt your concentration increases your mindfulness.
Weekly Practice (Mindfulness & Concentration)
If you followed along last week in the Weekly Practice (Impermanence), you may not have realized it, but we were also laying some groundwork for this week’s practice on mindfulness and concentration.
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