Live Session Summary, Sunday, August 7, 2022: Good to be with you for today’s Live session—our 100th consecutive Live going back to September 2020! The theme of the session was ‘Four Gifts of Spiritual Practice.’ I highlighted and discussed these four gifts:
1) We can train our mind: The Buddha taught that nothing can cause us more harm than an untrained mind—and nothing can do us more good than a trained mind. The training involves ‘abandoning the unskillful’ and ‘cultivating the good’—letting go of mind states and behaviors that lead to harm and suffering and developing and nurturing mind states and actions that lead to happiness and freedom. He also said, ‘whatever a person frequently thinks about and ponders on, this becomes the inclination of their mind.’ So it’s important to turn our attention towards qualities and mind states that lead to happiness and abandon those that lead to harm.
2) Our freedom comes through our own insight and understanding. No one else can give it to us. Teachers can help us greatly, but they only point the way. In an important discourse, the Kalama Sutta, the Buddha instructed the community to base their beliefs not on tradition, preferences, logic, emotional attachment, or because someone is their teacher. Rather, he said, ‘When you know for yourselves, these things are unhealthy… you should reject them.’ When practices lead to well-being and happiness, he said, you should cultivate them. ‘See for yourself.’ (Ehipassiko, in Pali)
3) The way we meet our experience, transforms the experience: Let’s say we receive some difficult news about our health or work situation. If we meet that experience with anger, frustration, anxiety, or self-blame, then it will be a more painful experience than if we receive that same information with kindness, acceptance, and equanimity. This is captured in the Buddha’s teaching of ‘dependent arising’—everything arises dependent on conditions; nothing has an independent existence. So, what we bring to any experience transforms that experience—and understanding this and its implications is freeing.
4) The journey to freedom begins with awareness of our experience in the present moment. The Buddha taught that mindfulness is a direct path to freedom: whatever we bring awareness to provides sufficient conditions to gain insight into the cause of suffering and how we can end suffering in our life. Nothing has to be different than it is. Painful experiences, as much as pleasant ones, can be grist for the mill of awakening.
Poems I shared at the Live session includes Dorothy Hunt’s ‘Peace is this moment without judgment’ and Muhyiddin Ibn Al-‘Arabi’s ‘There was a time when I would reject those…’ It was good to be with you all today. Have a lovely week and see you next Sunday, August 14, at 9am eastern for our next Live session. Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏼 🌻
