As a monk, I bring a strong commitment, along with the renunciate flavor, to the classic Buddhist teachings. I play with ideas, with humor and a current way of expressing the teachings, but I don't dilute them.
Sitting in a field of fifty to eighty people really starts my mind sparking. Since I don't prepare my talks ahead of time, I find myself listening to what I'm saying along with everyone else. This leaves a lot of room for the Dhamma to come up. Just having eighty people listening to me is enough to engage me, stimulate me, and create a nice flow of energy. The actual process of teaching evokes ideas that even I did not realize were being held somewhere in my mind.
Different teaching situations offer their own unique value. In retreat, you are able to build a cohesive and comprehensive body of the teachings. When people are not on retreat and come for one session, it opens a different window. They are more spontaneous and I'm given the chance to contact them in ways that are closer to their "daily-life mind." This brings up surprises and interesting opportunities for me to learn even more.
I'm continually struck by how important it is to establish a foundation of morality, commitment, and a sense of personal values for the Vipassana teachings to rest upon. Personal values have to be more than ideas. They have to actually work for us, to be genuinely felt in our lives. We can't bluff our way into insight. The investigative path is an intimate experience that empowers our individuality in a way that is not egocentric. Vipassana encourages transpersonal individuality rather than ego enhancement. It allow for a spacious authenticity to replace a defended personality.
I normally incorporate Qi Gong instruction in my retreats. They are not suitable as audio files but you can watch the nine videos here: https://tinyurl.com/Sucitto-qigong
We may feel more isolated than ever, but the truth is that we’re always captive in our sensory prisons. The aim is to liberate and open the heart so that qualities beyond sense consciousness can be realized. Key among the factors needed for liberation is kalyāṇamitta – spiritual friendship.
*Sutta reference AN9:3
It’s possible to meet suffering with an open heart. If the heart can open to grief, pain and vulnerability, a new view is possible – one beyond the cycle of birth and death. Keep the heart open to Dhamma, rooted in faith and goodwill. This is the Path to the deathless. *Sutta References: Therīgatha 6:2; Samyutta Nikaya 12:23; Samyutta Nikaya 1:10
Mindfulness based on body is the way out of the mind. From here I can witness feeling rather than dive into it. With wisdom we can come to prefer skillful intention rather than seeking good feeling. When intention is skillful conduct, there is no grasping at results. That feels good! And we are free to act without seeking a result, without becoming. *Sutta reference is AN10:58.
Recollection is not just thinking about things, it’s associated with the quality of careful attention. Encourage the mind to think slowly, touch the heart and abide in wholesome qualities. In daily life we do the external, but embedded in the ground of the heart is where your basis is. *Sutta reference is AN11:11-12.
We look for safety and stability in a level of experience that cannot provide it, that’s the source of agitation. In meditation we practice the ability to sustain ungrasping attention around a thought, feeling, situation, and particularly unpleasant feeling. The content will constantly shift, but the relationship to them, awareness, can become the source of stability. *Sutta reference is SN2:17.
We can use this experience of lock down to address the routines and standards that support our daily becoming. The mind is pulled further and further wondering what to do, planning what's next. What to do is stop, rest in the body, maintain deep attention. Consider rituals that nuplug and cut the tide of becoming.
By protecting ourselves we protect others. When we protect our own hearts from defensiveness, blame, hostility and stress, we also protect others. We train ourselves through the 4 foundations of mindfulness. *Sutta reference is SN47:19.
Even in this experience of physical isolation, we’re not exactly separate – we’re always with something. Practicing with the relational sense, we meet everything as it is rather than trying to change it or fix it. From this broad state of awareness, edges and boundaries soften, and the heart connects with lovingkindness, regardless of physical proximity.
Is it possible that the obstructions we meet are our fiercest teachers? We encounter the places where construction is no longer possible. It’s the last place we want to go, but if we can cultivate skillful means to linger there, we can taste nibbāna in this very life.
In Dhamma practice we’re inclining citta towards itself, gathering in attention to recognize where the heart is engaged. Certain engagements will lead to liberation. The practice of recollection is one.
A recollection of the qualities and effects of the teacher, Ajahn Chah. A teacher’s presence can bring forth a lot in people. They recognize the potential for strength that is there for all of us and help us develop pāramī.
Something in us – citta – searches for release from suffering. It struggles to rise out of old patterns, which means one has to enter them. Sweeping meditation is a skillful means. It’s not just a physical exercise but an opportunity to clear kamma.
We come to Dhamma practice hoping for calm and quiet, but that may be down the track a while. Begin instead with dialogue, listening to the inner chatter with patience and steadiness. As agitated and troubling states are lovingly met, the passion around them fades. We can experience the nibbāna element here and now.
Unskillful saṇkhāras can be undone in the same way they are formed – through perception. Choose particular tones like friendliness and welcome. Introduce them into the body and ask how it feels. Skillful use of perception and attention can sooth and steady the body’s energy.
Contact with the world causes citta to lose its sense of ground, space and rhythm. Use of body is recommended as a meditation theme. We practice to carefully meet contact impression, training intention and attention to be for one’s welfare.
The unawakened worldly mind seeks to accumulate. It generates a sense of self from holding on. The Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta points to release and letting go. We practice standing back from phenomena, allowing things to move and shift without reacting to them. Just witnessing and awake – this is liberation.
We are encouraged to understand saṇkhāra, the programs that take hold of us and result in unskillful states. It is possible to not act on these programs, release some of their pressure, and turn the citta towards skillful states.
Citta is only touched by feeling and perception. Through not seeing this, not feeling and directly handling it, the whole realm of dukkha gets fabricated. Meet experience directly, with mindfulness and wisdom, and suffering eases up.
The paradigm of practice is discerning skillful from unskillful heart states. We begin to turn away from the states that entangle the heart, and learn to linger in wholesome qualities. Skillful states always carry the mark of freedom.
With reference to AN10:61, this teaching reviews the nutriments that result in ignorance, and the nutriments that result in true knowledge and liberation. For the latter, it starts with a person of integrity, with kalyanamitta. We all model something to each other. Cultivating purity of mind, thought, intention, speech, action is then not only for our welfare, but for the welfare of others.
Intention is conditioned to move forward, to move to the next thing. But the encouragement here is to moderate one’s citta – volitional tendencies. Recollect the skillful, linger and deepen into the feeling of it until the mind is gladdened, settled, brought to singularity. There is always more to do on the conditioned level – taking time to store up the good in this way should not be neglected.
Like dust, defilements creep into the mind and build up. We live in a dusty world, it’s not a personal failing. The normal response is to be vigilant about sweeping – sustain mindfulness. Persistence, energy, and right attitude are required.
We can do better than just getting by. We can feel fulfilled in a deep way, released from our confusion and blind spots. We use meditation to cultivate qualities of non-suffering, comfort and steadiness and extend them. The resulting inner harmony becomes our vehicle for walking through the jungle of the heart.
The way of the world is linked up to the five hindrances, so we can’t often see them. Automatic attention takes you straight into them. Train attention to be broad and dispassionate. Recognize sense objects for what they are, a secondary reality. Primary reality is contact impression, how citta is affected.
The mind requires both calm and energy for release. Then abandonment comes through investigation. The investigation is calm and sympathetic; thinking is minimal, mostly feeling and sensing how it is. A return to forest dwellers’ practice is recommended.
With reference to MN19, this teaching addresses the two kinds of thought – ones that lead to my welfare, the welfare of others and the welfare of both, and ones that don’t. But rather than giving attention to the particular thoughts, encouragement is given to tune into the underlying mind stream. Get the feel of it. This requires holistic attention – for one to be alert, sensitive and receptive.
This guided meditation is an invitation to return to the kind of awareness standard of a forest dweller. Defocus and dislodge attention from particular points and details, and tune in to the overall sense of being here. Present, alert, attentive, knowing – not aware of anything, aware of everything.
We look for certainty in things that can ever be certain. Constantly pulled out by the world, we leave the only thing that can ever be certain – citta. Rather than attempt to get away from unpleasant feeling, we can review it, soothe and release some of its tangles. We might find it’s possible to be with discomfort, yet free and deeply secure.
Reflecting on the beginnings of Cittaviveka, there’s something to recognize beyond just the history. There’s the transmission, what’s happened in mind, heart and spirit. It can be tracked all the way to the Buddha and the first Noble Truth – a sign of inadequacy, suffering, stress and the wish to realize something further than that. A certain nobility of intention came out of that, and is the same thread of continuity that runs through the monastery today.
Mindfulness is the ability to bear things in mind with a steady intention. Like the sides of the hand, there is a hard side with its ability to bar and repel corrupting influences, and a soft side that lingers and takes in the qualities. Select an object of meditation based on what’s needed, and give attention to the careful holding.
Dhammas are things that directly affect citta. They can be awakening factors or hindrances. We train to skillfully handle them, like taming a wild animal. The thinking mind acts as the trainer. Based on citta’s responses, appropriate themes to settle and calm the mind are presented. Citta rewards such sensitivity and responsiveness with pleasure, ease and wisdom.
In meditation we bring energy to receptivity of the mind. Generally, mind is in active mode. But through listening, sensitizing, and not moving onto the next thing, heart awareness opens more fully.
When the mind is not steady and has gone into activation, clinging is inevitable. The clung-to experience creates the person. But there’s a choice. Our responsibility is to manage the flood of the aggregates through mindfulness.
The trained mind is fluid and flexible – natural. The untrained mind is fixed and grasping – loses its agility. Training comes through mindfulness of the 4 bases and 3 aspects of mind. Body gives mind something to anchor itself on so the habits of grasping that create a fixed self can be released.
Body provides a steady reference for mind. Mind by itself runs off and gets lost it thoughts and emotions. Body gives a place from which to review mental phenomena. Simply by paying attention to what’s happening directly in the body, the mode of attention shifts. We can use body to empty mental proliferation.
This energy field that carries sensation doesn’t just carry sensations from the physical world, but psychologically-induced experiences as well. This is where the experience of feeling starts to move between the bodily and mental base. If we practice with the feeling base of body, we have a guide for working with mental feeling.
We can get sidetracked with a focus on mindfulness or stress reduction or meditation techniques. We don’t understand what leads up to them, the Noble 8-Fold Path. This Path begins with right view - knowing the heart and how it’s affected - and right effort - bringing up skillful mindstates.
The average person operates under the assumption they are a person having experiences. If we look more deeply, we recognize it’s just experience, and experience creates the sense of a person having experiences. The ‘I’ who does things is the movement of kamma. ‘Myself’ is the results of what I hold into – what I incline to becomes the fundamental quality of ‘me.’
Different maps are given to track the trajectory from suffering to non-suffering. The themes are similar – finding resources to come into the present, meet what arises, not get stuck, know that no matter how pleasant or unpleasant this will pass – and we’re left with this openness. Trust the openness, where things end by themselves. This is the deathless.
Training in renunciation helps us know that nothing belongs to us except for kamma. What’s important is knowing what is skillful and unskillful, and to keep setting aside what’s not skillful. Come to know when the mind is coming from purity or confusion. Faith is a support in the midst of confusion and overwhelm.
Recollecting the Buddha’s awakening, we also sit, firmly, simply. When the forces of thought and feeling come, we sit peacefully, refusing to fight, run away or get involved. Letting it all move through, where is the stillness? Clarity is the mark of awakened ones, knowing exactly what is arising – naming it, sensing it.
Openness, the willingness to meet what arises, is one of our basic resources as human beings. The ability to open what is pleasant and unpleasant alike, knowing we can benefit, learn from it, gives a certain confidence. Mindfulness of body is our workshop to cultivate that ability to open to and bear with painful feeling. Not resisting or fighting it, just sustaining awareness and knowing it for what it is.
Awareness is one of the fundamental properties of mind. The practice of meditation is just bearing witness to what affects mind with a quality of primary openness. Bearing with experience and, rather than referring it to reactions or views or opinions, referring it awareness.
Mindfulness means looking more carefully. As we sustain attention on an object, we can begin to discern how we get caught and how we get free. Body as a foundation for mindfulness can mean mindfulness of breathing in and out, the elements, walking up and down, the unattractive parts, or contemplating a dead body. A review of several of these practices is given.
A reflection on the faculty of energy and how to apply it skillfully. Energy for investigation that leads to wisdom, energy for devotion and aspiration that uplifts the heart, energy for mindfulness of body that results in calm and insight.
These 5 faculties when cultivated and developed merge in the deathless. Faith, energy, concentration, mindfulness, wisdom. These are faculties we all have, but they may be poorly developed. Guidance is given for how to touch into these and strengthen them.
One particular faculty of mind is ability of step back and review the noise of the mind. It’s an amazingly remedial quality, to be able to hold our doubts and difficulties in this way. You don’t get an answer, but you get a result. The deconstruction of suffering, of stress.
Begins with guidance to establish a relaxed, steady, upright posture, wishing well throughout the body. When a balance of energy comes, begin turning the mind around. Get back to where the thoughts and memories are coming from. Direct yourself to the place of arising, before it takes form. The sense of formlessness and openness can then be experienced.
Practice meeting your reality directly, just being with what arises without getting involved. The spiritual faculties come alive and support you. When there’s nothing you can’t meet, what else do you need? Through this cultivation, you have a calming, cooling refuge place in your life.
When we meditate, we notice that mind is like a river, constantly moving along, continually generating conditions. One thing we can always come back to is paying attention. When we want or don’t want something, it generates stress. Just be open and pay attention. This unbiased attention is most useful. Mind settles by just paying attention.
Mind is endlessly moving, meandering, outflowing. Meditation is about bringing the mind back through the use of particular reference points. Use the guided meditation to firmly, kindly, repeatedly bring the mind back.
Death contemplation triggered the Buddha's search for the deathless. It is a recommended regular recollection that helps sieve the relative from the more profound. Guidance is given to contemplate various aspects of living and dying with questions for deeper reflection.
