Archive | Reflections on Practice

The Buddha taught that every human birth is precious & worthy of gratitude. In one of his well-known analogies, he said that receiving a human birth is more rare than the chance that a blind turtle floating in the ocean would stick its head through a small hoop. He would often instruct a monk to take his ground cloth into the forest, sit at the base of a tree, and begin “gladdening the heart” by reflecting on the series of fortunate circumstances that had given the monk the motivation & ability to seek freedom through understanding the dharma.

Practicing mindfulness of gratitude consistently leads to a direct experience of being connected to life & the realization that there is a larger context in which your personal story is unfolding. Being relieved of the endless wants & worries of your life’s drama, even temporarily, is liberating. Cultivating thankfulness for being part of life blossoms into a feeling of being blessed, not in the sense of winning the lottery, but in a more refined appreciation for the interdependent nature of life. It also elicits feelings of generosity, which create further joy. Gratitude can soften a heart that has become too guarded, and it builds the capacity for forgiveness, which creates the clarity of mind that is ideal for spiritual development.

Let me be clear: The practice of gratitude is not in any way a denial of life’s difficulties. We live in troubling times, and no doubt you’ve experienced many challenges, uncertainties, and disappointments in your own life. Nor does the practice of gratitude deny the Buddha’s teaching on death: Death is certain; your death is certain; the time of death is unknown; the time of your death is unknown. Rather, gratitude practice is useful because it turns the mind in such a way that it enables you to live into life or, more accurately, to die into life. Having access to the joy & wonderment of life is the antidote to feelings of scarcity & loss. It allows you to meet life’s difficulties with an open heart. The understanding you gain from practicing gratitude frees you from being lost or identified with either the negative or the positive aspects of life, letting you simply meet life in each moment as it rises.

Gratitude for the grace of conscious embodiment evolves into the practice of selfless gratitude, in which your concerns slowly but surely shift from being mostly about yourself & those close to you to being about all living beings. As this occurs, you need less & less in the way of good fortune. It becomes enough that there are those who are happy, who are receiving love, who are safe, and who have a promising future. It is not that you would not prefer good things for yourself, but your sense of well-being is no longer contingent on external circumstances. You are able to rejoice that amidst all life’s suffering there exists joy. You realize that pain & joy are part of a mysterious whole. When this state of selfless gratitude starts to blossom, your mind becomes more spacious, quieter, and your heart receives its first taste of the long-sought release from fear & wanting. This is grace.

View full article on Phillip’s website: dharmawisdom.org/

Phillip Moffitt has been teaching Vipasanna meditation throughout the U.S. since completing teacher training at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in 1998. A former publishing executive, Phillip is founder of the Life Balance Institute, dedicated to study & practice of spiritual values in daily life. He also founded the Marin Sangha in San Rafael CA & is a teacher & member of the Guiding Teachers Council at Spirit Rock. His books include “Dancing with Life.”

Depending on your quality of mind,
the object may be perceived
differently & the view changes.

Your watching mind must be strong & purified, with less defilement. If your mind is ready, understanding arises. So take care of your mind, take care of your practice & take care of your watching mind. Cultivate it so that it is stronger & stronger.

Our duty is to make the quality of awareness stronger. Stronger awareness means awareness & wisdom are working together continuously. This is awareness with the right view, right attitude, right idea, and right thought. If this is continuous, then the mind is stronger & stronger. We only need to do this. If the mind becomes stronger it can do its job. Dhamma does its job & nature does its job.

We are not trying to see the object. We are not trying to look for something. We are trying to make the meditating mind stronger & stronger.

How do we make the mind stronger? When we are aware, with the right attitude & right understanding, then the mind has wisdom & it becomes stronger. This is not because we are putting in a lot of energy; if we use too much energy the mind will become tired. If we try to see something, the mind becomes tenser. We are cultivating the quality of awareness to make the mind stronger & stronger. If we have awareness with wisdom & continuity, then the mind becomes stronger & stronger. When the mind becomes stronger it can do its job.

There is more understanding. It should be like this. When we have more understanding, we have less resistance & fewer reactions. Because of reactions, we suffer. Because of learning, we understand. With understanding comes confidence.

For someone who has been meditating or practicing for a long time,
the mind must be of a better & better quality. The mind is more aware,
more stable & more peaceful.

Excerpt from Sayadaw’s book “Dhamma everywhere: Welcoming each moment with Awareness & Wisdom.” [Entire book available on-line]

Sayadaw U Tejaniya began his Buddhist training as a young teenager in Burma under the late Shwe Oo Min Sayadaw. After a career in business & life as a householder, he has been a permanent monk since 1996. He feels that his experience developing his practice while living as a householder helps him understands both the challenges yogis face in integrating their meditation practice with their everyday lives & how to overcome them.

It’s a strange phenomenon how difficult people find it to love themselves. One would think it is the easiest thing in the world, because we’re constantly concerned with ourselves. We’re always interested in how much we can get, how well we can perform, how comfortable we can be. The Buddha mentioned in a discourse that “oneself is dearest to oneself.”  So with all that, why is it so difficult to actually love oneself?

Loving oneself certainly doesn’t mean indulging oneself. Really loving is an attitude towards oneself that most people don’t have, because they know quite a few things about themselves which are not desirable. Everybody has innumerable attitudes, reactions, likes & dislikes which they’d be better off without. Judgment is made & while one likes one’s positive attitudes, one dislikes the others. With that comes suppression of those aspects of oneself that one is not pleased with. One doesn’t want to know about them & doesn’t acknowledge them. That’s one way of dealing with oneself, which is detrimental to growth…

The only thing that is real is that we have six roots within us. Three roots of good & three roots of evil. The latter are greed, hate & delusion, but we also have their opposites: generosity, loving-kindness & wisdom. Take an interest in this matter. If one investigates this & doesn’t get anxious about it, then one can easily accept these six roots in everybody. No difficulty at all, when one has seen them in oneself. They are the underlying roots of everyone’s behavior. Then we can look at ourselves a little more realistically, namely not blaming ourselves for the unwholesome roots, not patting ourselves on the back for the wholesome ones, but rather accepting their existence within us. We can also accept others more clear-sightedly & have a much easier time relating to them…

Clarity of thinking comes from purification of one’s emotions, which is a difficult job that needs to be done. But it can only be done successfully when it isn’t an emotional upheaval, but clearcut, straightforward work that one does on oneself. When it is considered to be just that, it takes the sting out of it. The charge of “I’m so wonderful” or “I’m so terrible” is defused. We are neither wonderful nor terrible. Everyone is a human being with all the potential & all the obstructions. If one can love that human being, the one that is “me” with all its faculties & tendencies, then one can love others realistically, usefully & helpfully. But if one makes a break in the middle & loves the part which is nice & dislikes the part which isn’t nice enough, one’s never going to come to grips with reality. One day we’ll have to see it, for what it is. It’s a “working ground,” a kammatthana. It’s a straightforward & interesting affair of one’s own heart.

Excerpted from “All of Us Beset by birth, decay, and death”
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/khema/allofus.html

Ayya Khema (1923-1997), the first Western woman to become a Theravadin Buddhist nun, served as a model & inspiration for women from all the Buddhist traditions who have sought to revive the practice of women’s monasticism in modern times. In 1987, she co-ordinated the first international conference of Buddhist nuns in the history of Buddhism, which resulted in creation of Sakyadhita, a world-wide Buddhist women’s organization. https://www.buddhanet.net/khema.htm

In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over a mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair tied in a knot,
a model of concentration.

Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word
for what he does, or does not do.

Even the season is wrong for him.
In all his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid?
Is this not implied by his serene expression,
that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?

But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.

This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.

He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway
you could back the car down easily
and drive off into the vanities of the world
with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.

All morning long we work side by side,
me with my commentary
and he inside his generous pocket of silence,
until the hour is nearly noon
and the snow is piled high all around us;
then, I hear him speak.
After this, he asks,
can we go inside and play cards?

Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk
and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table
while you shuffle the deck.
and our boots stand dripping by the door.

Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes
and leaning for a moment on his shovel
before he drives the thin blade again
deep into the glittering white snow.

Billy Collins, called “the most popular poet in America” by the New York Times, was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He recently retired from 50 yrs teaching at Lehman College of the City University of New York. This poem appeared in his 1998 book “Picnic, Lightning.”