Date/Time
Date(s) - 07/04/2021
6:45 pm - 8:00 pm
Categories
Due to the COVID-19 Nagaloka is closed to the public. We decided best not to have any in person meditation or study group sessions on Wednesday evening or Sunday AM.
Instead we will be meeting online. Join us by clicking on this Zoom link on Wednesday evenings, 6:45-8:00pm . We value Sangha (spiritual community) and feel it is important for us to have the opportunity to be together. We will use this time to meditation along with a short check in to see how we can best support one another. Plus the facilitator will continue on our Dharma theme offering everyone a focus for our practice. We look forward to seeing you and sharing our love and kindness for the wellness of all beings.
This week we will end our exploration of the Lokavipatti Sutta, The Eight Worldly Winds, with Pleasure and Pain.
How does the uninstructed person respond to pleasure and pain? “They welcome pleasure and rebel against the arisen pain. As they are consumed with welcoming and rebelling they are not released from suffering I tell you.” How does the instructed person respond? “They reflect, pleasure, pain… has arisen in me. It is inconstant, stressful, and subject to change. They discern it as it actually is. They do not welcome or rebel against pleasure and pain.” As they thus abandon welcoming and rebelling, they are released from birth, aging and death, from sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses and despair. They are released,I tell you, from suffering and distress.”
It is important, with wise attention, to distinguish between the physical feeling/sensations that we experience because we have a body and the emotional layering that we add to that experience. When in contact with the environment, the body/mind, through our senses, will register either a pleasant, a painful or a neutral feeling/sensation.
There are only three basic feelings/sensations. Our very personal emotional layering is then added to the raw data of arisen pleasant, painful or neutral feelings depending upon our views, life experience and preferences. This contact and response is ongoing, and how we react/respond shapes the moment and our future.
With wise ethical attention, through kind, mindful practice, we can notice and open the space between the initial inevitable sense contact and a reactive often stressful response. Imagine expanding the gap between contact/stimulus and reactive response and filling that gap with tolerance and love.
This training and practice with ‘wise attention’, with how we choose to react/respond to the world, can benefit ourselves and others. Then rooted like a giant tree at rest in the buffeting winds, we will be “released from suffering and distress.”
“Peace comes from within. Do not seek it externally.”
Click here to read the sutta from which this teaching comes.
Join us to explore….this Wednesday…!
Nagaloka’s Friends Night overview Nagaloka handout friends night July 2020
Check out this great resource: https://www.freebuddhistaudio.com/
Please contact us if you have any questions. Email info@nagalokabuddistcenter.org
Please feel free to join us.
