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Schedule
Friday nights, 7-9 pm. Doors open at 6:45.
1716A Linden Avenue (door on the right)
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Save the Date! 2012 Fall Retreat
St. Mary's Sewanee
September 12-16
Join us for the 2012 Luminous Mind Retreat at St. Mary's in Sewanee, TN. The retreat will be held in noble silence, Wednesday evening through Sunday noon. Teacher and other details to be determined. Stay tuned!
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Teaching of the Week
from Ken McLeod
When you practice meditation, how often do you experience a persistent running commentary on how you are doing?
What do you do with this voice? If you try to shut it out, it just gets louder, more insistent, more critical. If you try to placate it or negotiate with it, you end up in an endless and fruitless conversation and any sense of meditation goes out the window.
Three suggestions.
First, rest in your body.
An old Tibetan instruction:
Body on the cushion.
Mind in the body.
Relaxation in the mind.
Nothing here about having no thoughts, having no voices. Just be in your body, and rest there.
A resting mind is the result, not the method, of practice. The method is to come back into the experience of breathing and rest there. Rest, return, rest, return, rest, return. That's the method.
Second, autumn's leaves swirl in the wind.
When you go for a walk on a windy fall day, leaves swirl around you, but they don't in any way stop you from walking, or from enjoying your walk. Let the voice rattle on, with all its criticism. Don't indulge it. That would be like chasing leaves. Don't ignore it. That would be closing your eyes when you walk. Just go for your walk.
Third, listen to the silence in sound.
No matter what is going on in your meditation, there is a space, an openness, in which movement takes place, a space in which thoughts, feelings and sensations arise. When thoughts arise, our attention collapses down onto the thought, and any sense of space and resting vanish. When a sound arises, we stop listening to the silence and focus just on the sound. Listen to the silence in the sound of the critical voice. Rest in the space in which the critical voice arises.
--Ken McLeod, Buddhist teacher and writer
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Tonight we begin Chapter 7 in Ken McLeod's magnum opus, Wake Up to Your Life. Topic: The Four Immeasurables. We have spent the past 12 weeks learning these principles from Pema Chodron. Now we'll experience Ken's way of teaching these vital principles.