21 Oct
2014
Posted in: Movies
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Cinema Nibbana

*** Announcing the Grand Opening of Dharma Movie Night ***

On Friday night (10/24), DharmaTown will host Dharma Movie Night, which I hope will be the first of many such evenings. We’ll be showing Enlightenment Guaranteed, “a brilliant comedy about self discovery” (according to the Washington Post.)

They showed it at the retreat I was just at!

The plan is to host Dharma Movie Night approximately once a month at the home of one of our sangha members. If you’re interested in attending, contact me by email here. Admission is free. Popcorn will be provided!

If you can’t make it….rent it. (We’re getting our copy at the public library.)

Enjoy.

20 Oct
2014
Posted in: Retreats
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Instead of 1,000 Words

I’m back from the retreat at Flowering Lotus, but not quite ready to start writing again. So instead, I’ll just share this photo (worth, I hope, a thousand words), taken on the last day of the retreat. (Click to enlarge.)

I had a wonderful time. Wish you were there.

9 Oct
2014
Posted in: Retreats
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Baptist-Turned-Buddhist

I’m leaving early tomorrow morning to attend a retreat led by Baptist-Preacher-turned-Buddhist-Nun, Venerable Pannavati at Flowering Lotus Retreat Center in Magnolia, Mississippi. I haven’t sat a retreat with her before, but I’ve heard her speak, and honey…..she’s a hoot!

But she’s also a Ph.D, and an ordained nun in both the Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist traditions, as well as the co-founder and co-Abbot of Embracing Simplicity Hermitage in Hendersonville, NC. She’s organized full ordination for female monastics in Cambodia and Thailand; runs a residential, non-profit, job-training gluten-free bakery for homeless youth in North Carolina; supports 10 “untouchable” villages in India; and more. So, basically, she’s just pretty awesome. (Check out her website here.)

I’ll get back from retreat on Oct 17, but it will take me a while to get back to “normal.” So check back here on Monday, Oct 20 for my next post.

 

8 Oct
2014
Posted in: Poems
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Everywhere We Look

The moon was beautiful last night.

Maybe you missed it, but if you were outside you probably didn’t, because it was so big and bright. And beautiful. In fact, it was SO beautiful that perfect strangers stopped in the middle of the street and pointed it out to each other. (I was one of them!)

And then early this morning, there was a total eclipse. A “blood moon” in which, thanks to refraction by the earth’s atmosphere, both the eclipse and the rising sun could be seen simultaneously.

What an amazing and beautiful world we live in.

In honor of which, I offer this excerpt from “Gravel,” by Mary Oliver. (The entire poem can be found here.)

It is the nature of stone
to be satisfied.
It is the nature of water
to want to be somewhere else.

Everywhere we look:
the sweet guttural swill of the water
tumbling.
Everywhere we look:
the stone, basking in the sun,

or offering itself
to the golden lichen.

It is our nature not only to see
that the world is beautiful

but to stand in the dark, under the stars,
or at noon, in the rainfall of light,

frenzied,
wringing our hands,

half-mad, saying over and over:

what does it mean, that the world is beautiful–
what does it mean? 

7 Oct
2014
Posted in: Practice
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Taking Refuge

Today I offer for your reflection, one of the exercises from the on-line Dharmagiri Course that my study buddy, Carolyn, and I have found to be quite “enlightening.”

Several times a day, ask yourself:  “Where am I placing my trust?”

The traditional practice for Buddhists is to trust (“take refuge”) in: (1) the Buddha, (2) the Dhamma, and (3) the Sangha. What this means is that we trust (1) our natural ability to wake up from the confusion that keeps us trapped in feelings of discomfort, dis-ease, and dissatisfaction, (2) the teachings that show us the way to wake up, and (3) all those who have actually woken up!

Which is great.

But a good hard look at what we actually do…when we’re feeling lonely, or anxious, or upset, or whatever…can help us see that (maybe, just maybe) we are actually putting our trust in a lot of other things.

Ice cream, for example.

Or vodka. Or the internet. Or keeping really, really, really busy.

We ask the question, not as a way to make us feel bad about what we’re going. But to make us conscious of what we’re doing.

Which is another way of saying….to wake up!

6 Oct
2014
Posted in: Poems
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Winged Energy of Delight

Over the weekend I listened to a wonderful talk by Phillip Moffitt given at the retreat that’s going on at Spirit Rock right now. I love the title of the talk — Getting Our Ducks in a Row: Sattipatana and the Seven Factors of Awakening

There’s a lot of humor in this talk, which focuses primarily on the happy and enjoyable aspects of the practice listed in the Factors of Awakening…as opposed to the Hindrances, which are the difficult states, and which often seem to get a lot more of our attention!

One translation of these Seven Factors are: Mindfulness (sati), Curiosity (dhammacicaya), Energy (viriya), Delight (piti), Calm (passaddhi), Collected Attention (samadhi), and Peace (upekkha).

It’s a very enjoyable talk as you might image, given the topic. (Click here to listen.) Towards the end, he quotes a poem by Rilke that I haven’t heard him use before. It’s called As Once the Winged Energy of Delight:

As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood’s dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.

Wonders happen if you can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.

To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions….For the god
wants to know himself in you. 

3 Oct
2014
Posted in: Poems, Talks
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Mysterious, But Not Magical

I listened to a talk by Phillip Moffitt last night, given at the opening of a retreat being held right now at Spirit Rock. The talk is primarily an overview of the practice, with particular emphasis on the “non-doing” aspect of what we’re “doing” when we practice. We practice with intention. But what happens as a result of our practice, is beyond our control.

It’s so mysterious,” he says, “but it’s not magical.”

By which I take him to mean that the practice unfolds in an orderly fashion, but not of an order that is easy to discern.

We sit in stillness, without expectation,” he says. “And all eventually opens of its own accord.

At the end of the talk, Phillip reads a passage from the Four Quartets, by T.S. Eliot. He says that these are the lines that during a very difficult time of his life — which lasted for a couple of years — gave him the presence to continue:

“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” 

***

Click here to listen to the talk.

 

2 Oct
2014
Posted in: Practice
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When Conditions Change….

My sister is having out-patient knee surgery today and needs my help….which means that conditions are such that I only have time for a brief post. So, I leave you with this:

All conditioned things are impermanent,
Their nature is to arise and pass away.
To live in harmony with this truth
Brings true happiness. 

1 Oct
2014
Posted in: Poems
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Fire Element

There is another method for contemplating the body that is given in the Satipatthana Sutta and discussed in Chapter 10 of Joseph’s Mindfulness book. The instructions are to experience all sensations of the body as being made up of the Earth Element (hardness/firmness), the Water Element (fluidity/cohesiveness), the Fire Element (heat/cold), and the Air Element (movement/pressure).

It’s a very interesting practice, which I won’t go into in depth here. (For that, check out the book!) Instead, I leave you with this poem. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the practice. Except, perhaps, as an inspiration!

Spanish Dancer
by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell

As on all its sides a kitchen-match darts white
flickering tongues before it bursts into flame:
with the audience around her, quickened, hot,
her dance begins to flicker in the dark room.

And all at once it is completely fire.

One upward glance and she ignites her hair
and, whirling faster and faster, fans her dress
into passionate flames, till it becomes a furnace
from which, like startled rattlesnakes, the long
naked arms uncoil, aroused and clicking.

And then: as if the fire were too tight
around her body, she takes and flings it out
haughtily, with an imperious gesture,
and watches: it lies raging on the floor,
still blazing up, and the flames refuse to die–.
Till, moving with total confidence and a sweet
exultant smile, she looks up finally
and stamps it out with powerful small feet.

30 Sep
2014
Posted in: Practice
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“Judging is a Sense Desire”

Our KM group had a great discussion last night about “sense restraint,” which according to Joseph Goldstein’s Mindfulness book, is important “so that the mind doesn’t wander mindlessly in the alluring realm of sense object.”

He goes on to say, “Restraint is not something that is highly valued in our culture. We often see renunciation as a burdensome activity, something we think might be good for us, but which we really don’t like. Another way of understanding its value, though, would be to see renunciation as the practice of non-addiction. In this way of understanding, we can more easily experienced its true flavor of freedom.”

After reading that paragraph, we talked for a while about our own experiences of “sense restraint” with things like chocolate, or cigarettes, or even Diet Coke!

And then Thomas was reminded of a statement that Phillip Moffitt once made, which has stuck with him..and with me. Phillip said: “Judging is a sense desire.” (Because, in Buddhist understanding, the mind is a sense organ, just like the eye or the ear or the nose.)

Now that puts a very interesting light on what we’re doing when we judge other people. We’re indulging in sense desire. Just like going for that extra brownie. There is a momentary pleasure. (We feel superior. Or safe. Or smart. Or right. Or whatever.) But then there’s the downside. (We cut ourselves off from others. Or we get tight and lose our ability to see the big picture, to notice and appreciate the good qualities. Or we turn sour and angry. Or bitter. Or resentful. Etc.)

But just like with our other sense desires, we can learn to feel the urge to indulge, but then stop, maybe just saying “not now,” and with practice, we can be free from their compulsive power!