Advertise on podcast: Charlotte Center For Mindfulness // Podcasts

The teachings of the Buddha start with the Four Noble Truths, the first of which is that in  this life there is dukkha, often translated as suffering.  In these challenging times, it is so helpful to understand how opening and encouraging engaging with this teaching can be.

This world – absolutely pure As is. Behind the fear, Vulnerability. Behind that, Sadness, then compassion And behind that the vast sky. -Rick Fields, written while working with terminal cancer

Cognitive Science is identifying different ways we relate to “self” that are very useful for untangling a challenging moment. This relates beautifully to Phillip Moffit’s quote: A crucial skill from minimizing emotional chaos and sustaining clarity in your life is the ability to distinguish between your experience in your interpretation of your experience. Your experience is simply whatever is happening in the moment— a sound, a taste, bodily sensation, and emotion, any kind of interaction, etc. Your interpretation is your mind’s reaction to that experience.  If you want the whole article from Phillip Moffit, which is a beautiful read, here is the link

Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet wrote, “Work is love made visible.”  That’s a beautiful description also of why and how we practice.  What orientation is needed in this moment right now for practice to be making love visible?

This sharing explores how opening to our own resistance in a moment, even a seemingly innocuous moment such as dog training, can untangle a whole mess– or at least allow more space to befriend, or be friendly with, the mess…

Quote from Gil Fronsdal: Where in my life do I postpone kindness until non-wellbeing goes away— and what shifts when I practice wellbeing that includes non-wellbeing? A helpful way to practice this is to treat moments of non-well-being as worthy of care rather than as evidence of failure. When irritation, sorrow, fatigue, fear, or disappointment arise let them be included in the field of kindness: “This too belongs.” Then you notice what changes when you stop requiring the inner weather to be different before you offer friendliness.

In this reflection on Judson Brewer’s “gear 3”, we explore how useful an analogy of riding a wild horse is for understanding our own reactivity.

As we practice, we begin to understand an infinite receptive capacity of awareness to hold it all and allow our wisdom to come forward.

Continuing to explore Judson Brewer’s model– today’s sharing is a bit about “gear 2” and then a self-inquiry exercise. For the pdf of the exercise, click here.

Using the formal sit as a gift to invite the best friend of sati, mindfulness as a support in opening to our own selves.

A beautiful old story from the Brothers Grimm called the Water of Life offers a powerful metaphor for life and practice.

Clouds In Each Paper, by Thich Nhat Hanh If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. "Interbeing" is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix "inter" with the verb "to be", we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud, we cannot have paper, so we can say that the cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are. If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger's father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist. -- Published at www.awakin.org on Mar 25, 2002

This meditation is opening to a beautiful place that exists right in the heart of any moment-- just as it is, easy, challenging and everything in-between.

In this meditation we explore what happens right at that moment when we wake up from the mind drifting and the rich potency of this moment for teaching us about refuge, release, relief and letting go. BIRD WINGS Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror up to where you are bravely working. Expecting the worst, you look, and instead, here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see. Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as bird wings. -Rumi From The Essential Rumi Trans. Coleman Barks with John Moyne

This is a second sharing on the importance of bringing a light playful attitude into our heart/mindfulness practice.  As one researcher points out:   "Play lies at the core of creativity and innovation and allows us to be free of the constraints of time and to experience a diminished consciousness of self. It allows us to explore new ways of thinking and behaving so that we are not locked into a rigid way of doing things, are open to variation, see things in a different way, and gain new insights. Play allows us to break down barriers that separate us from others and fosters connection with others."   Thanks to Still Water Mindfulness Practice Center for a beautiful article on play and mindfulness: https://www.stillwatermpc.org/dharma-topics/the-power-of-play/ Part one of sharing: Here