Thich Nhat Hanh translates this Sutta as the Four “Establishments” of Mindfulness. Others have used Four “Foundations” of Mindfulness. Either way, it teaches us how to meditate. At the very base of the practice. Meditation is to look deeply and see the essence of things. We can begin right now. No need to wait. No need to become a monastic. Yes, the teachings were given to monastics but we can all apply this teaching and discover freedom. Mindfulness means to have awareness. Through our practice of meditation, we can establish mindfulness in ourselves. Mindfulness is always mindfulness of something, and so the Sutta provides guidance in four areas. Specifically, the body, the feelings, the mind, and the objects of mind. 

Now, we could practice this teaching in isolation and simply use it for learning to meditate. We see many examples around us in society where meditation can heal. This is good. But I think we would miss so much more – the spiritual nature of mindfulness practice. The ability to take our suffering and transform it to peace and joy. This is the path. A way out of suffering through using the tools of mediation. Meditation is a tool to help us see our thinking. Another teacher, Rodney Smith, said “Buddhanature (to be a buddha) is present in all of us, but it is often simply obscured by our thinking.” We think and analyze a great deal. The mind is constantly active and, for the most part, we’re comfortable there. It’s far easier to sit and think than it is to bring quiet to the mind. It’s not our natural state in the evolution of our species.

I commute to work about 35-miles each day. It’s a lot of time in the car, and it’s a beautiful drive through a mountain pass and along the ocean. Despite the beauty, I am often challenged by those around me as the mountain road is a two-lane curvy road and the freeway along the ocean is often jammed up with traffic. I can be an impatient driver. This is my practice edge and it can (does) cause me to suffer. My thinking says to me, if only I can get past this car in front of me then I’ll be in a much better place. Happier. More in control. My thinking has obscured my ability to be a buddha.

We all probably have experiences where our thinking blocks us from seeing the beauty and touching the joy of living. Meditation is a tool that I’ve used to help train my mind to come back to the present moment and touch the essence of reality right now. Using this Sutta can help us with that training.

The Sutta is very detailed in how to practice with each of the elements – body, feelings, mind, objects of mind.

Because the sutta is long and has many exercises, I’d like to focus today on a small group of guided meditations that work with the 10th exercise of the Satipatthana Sutta. The purpose here is to bring ease, peace, and joy not just to the body, but also to the heart and mind. To be able to nourish the practice of joy. This practice can be used to end agitation, desire, and hatred.

Sitting down in a comfortable and stable position, we bring our attention to our breathing.

1. I am breathing in and making my whole body calm and at peace. I am breathing out and making my whole body calm and at peace.
2. I am breathing in and feeling joyful. I am breathing out and feeling joyful.
3. I am breathing in and feeling happy. I am breathing out and feeling happy.
4. I am breathing in and making my mind happy and at peace. I am breathing out and making my mind happy and at peace.

Let this practice penetrate your entire body. We envelope our entire being with these feelings. Every part of our body; it’s like slipping into a pool of water. The feeling is everywhere. Throughout.

And then, like with others feelings, we know this too is impermanent and we can let go and see the deeper teachings of Interbeing. But that is for another day.

Questions for Reflection 

As you consider this short teaching, can you identify an “edge” in your life where you can practice with seeing your thinking as a barrier to establishing mindfulness – to becoming a buddha? If you went through any of the four example meditations above, what was that experience like? Was it easy? Difficult?

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Hello body, I know you are there and I smile in amazement.

I first felt the emergence of sickness over two weeks ago. Some grumpiness in my emotions and a little tickle in my throat. It didn’t seem like much the first couple days but I knew something was happening in my body. It’s good to be attuned to my body.

The sickness came slowly and then in the second week it got worse and I spent three days in bed. What can you do aside from observe the body and take care of it wholeheartedly. When in that state of sickness, it definitely dominates everything. Thinking. Feeling. Touch.

Yesterday I managed to stay up all day and putter about the house. Feeling the body get better and also sensing its weakness. Its limits. Today is much the same in that I am up and about but feel the shortness of breath and the limits of the body as it continues to heal.

I miss my routine and my normal energy level (my coffee!!) but can’t push to fast or hard to get there. Soon I will be able to return to my daily run and my daily sitting meditation. For now, I honor my body and its need to rest.

My meditation on sickness of the body is best observed within the sickness. All we encounter is an opportunity for practice.

Finally, I am very grateful to Leslie who has cared for me these past days. Thank you.

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• the beautiful sunshine
• arriving at work super early
• dinner organized by Leslie (yummy food from Farmer & the Cook)
• completing two OCLC WMS tasks that have been waiting for weeks
• completing a sangha directory request from the UK that’s been waiting for months (and it wasn’t even that difficult)
• new David Sylvian bootlegs (2003 & 2007)
• shipment of Tonx coffee arrived - they are Sandia de Puno from Peru
• making new connections on LinkedIn

I’m just going to stop there so I can also be happy for my bed in a few minutes.

Peace.

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In all cases, I have practiced being mindful about the content I share and have the hope of cultivating positive relationships. It has served me well over the past 6-7 years of regular sharing. I have taught full semester courses and workshops on social media and it has therefore contribute directly to my livelihood. I have found new friends and I also believe has served as a platform to share the practice of mindfulness and meditation. This is all good and I love playing with the technology.

As with most valuable things, it takes time to cultivate and nourish and, as you know, there are also a limited number of hours in the day to spend on various activities. Social media can also function as a distraction. A distraction to bring present with family and colleagues in the physical form. But more than that, a distraction to my mind and body – to my own well being.

All this reflection leads me to consider an experiment. My teacher encourages practitioners to experiment and to look deeply. Am I ready to embark on my social media experiment of reducing or focusing it on just one or two platforms? I’m not certain. I’ve invested so much time and energy in creating these spaces. It’s become such an integral part of my personality and the “who I am” in work and sangha.

In looking at the spaces, they’ve naturally formed in unique ways. Fr example, on Twitter I’ve mostly interacted with my library profession. On Google+ there has been a wealth of mindfulness practitioners. And app.net has been just fun meeting and interacting with engineers and developers. Facebook just seems to be a necessity for managing pages.

So, what to do? What kind of intention do I want to set? What form will it take? It could be completely black and white – turn some off. Or, it could have regulation whereby it’s of my phone or limited to only certain times of day. Where is the value and what purpose is it serving? I honestly don’t have an answer yet, so this is a public reflection and nothing may change other than my attention.

Where are you with these themes? Unconcerned? Focused? What are you doing with social media and mindfulness?

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Ev was talking about mindfully building a company from the ground up without really talking much about his new company called Obvious. He talked about meditation practice, about building culture, and about using Holacracy within the new company. This is something to explore and learn more about.

The day began with Ev and got increasingly better. I’m sitting at the end of the day with a cup of coffee and an espresso feeling inspired and motivated; trying to digest all that I heard.

Receiving the dharma rain throughout the day from the likes of Padmasree Warrior (CTO for Cisco), Gopi Kallayil (Google), Jack Kornfield, Tony Schwartz (Energy Project), Pam Weiss (Appropriate Response), Jane Fulton Suri (IDEO), Bradley Horowitz (Google), Peter Deng (Facebook), Melissa Daimler (Twitter), Jon Kabat-Zinn, and a fantastic interview with Jeff Weiner (CEO of LinkedIn).

A few highlights that I’m left with to ponder include integrating mindful planning into my work day, discovering my True Job, and managing compassion. My thoughts go to how this can manifest at Santa Barbara City College in my capacity as the director for the Luria Library and soon-to-be Academic Senate President.

All this relates to everything indeed. My work as a dharma teacher, a parent, a partner, a mentor, a librarian, a colleague. Cultivating wisdom and compassion is my practice. I’m feeling the energy to focus on how I can share about being a mindful leader here on misc.joy even more. Please encourage and support me on this endeavor.

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Non-Fiction

1. What the Plus! Google+ for the Rest of Us Guy Kawasaki (ebook)
2. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle Alexander
3. Bite-Sized Marketing: Realistic Solutions for the Over Worked Librarian Nancy Dowd
4. The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity Bruce Hood 368 pages
5. Awakening of the Heart: Essential Buddhist Sutras and Commentaries Thich Nhat Hanh 544 pages
6. Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh Thich Nhat Hanh, Melvin McLeod 384 pages
7. Making Space: Creating a Home Meditation Practice Thich Nhat Hanh 92 pages
8. Healing: A Woman’s Journey from Doctor to Nun Sister Dang Nghiem 146 pages
9. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking Susan Cain 368 pages (didn’t finish)
10. A Handful of Quiet: Happiness in Four Pebbles by Thich Nhat Hanh 62 pages
11. Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Committment by Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks (my wife just reminded me that I read this book too)

Fiction

1. Time Travelers Never Die Jack McDevitt 385 pages
2. The Facility: A Novel Simon Lelic 352 pages
3. Cloud Atlas David Mitchell, 509 pages
4. Amped Daniel H. Wilson 352 pages
5. Among Others Jo Walton 304 pages (ebook)
6. Those Across the River Christopher Buehlman 352 pages

See my online bookshelf with details and reviews.

The post What I Read in 2012 appeared first on misc-joy.

I’d like to start a discussion on building the Beloved Community. I think it can applied to so many aspects of suffering, violence, peace, justice, and compassion. Martin Luther King saw this wisdom as it related to racial injustice and violence in the United States and the war in Vietnam. His vision for a beloved community still resonates today and hasn’t been fully manifested. As written on the King Center site, the beloved community is an “achievable goal that could be attained by a critical mass of people committed to and trained in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence.”

We can try responding by cultivating our own beloved community. Strength resides in our connections.

What do you think?

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If you are in a time zone that supports being awake, then you can watch these talks live on the New Livestream  - the talks may be archived here as well, but there hasn’t been consistent archiving on the Livestream site.

If you would like to watch at a time of your choosing, and can wait a day or two, most talks are archived on Vimeo  - if you create an account on Vimeo, you can often download the talks and save to your computer or share with your sangha. Right now there are almost 300 videos on this site and, like the Livestream site, it is managed by the monastics at Plum Village.

If you’re interested in a comprehensive archive of dharma talks starting with Winter 2009-2010 then look no further than tnhaudio.org – this searchable site includes annotations for each talk and therefore sometimes it takes a few days or week to get a talk posted. If you use iTunes, you can find this source in the Podcast library and each talk will automatically download to your computer. Alternatively, you can get an email notification for each talk by adding your email address on the home page (right side). This site is managed by me and the language posted is always in English regardless of the language of the talk.

Finally, a great source that is pretty reliable is the Vietnamese site Lang Mai – here you can usually get French, English, and Vietnamese versions of each talk. Unfortunately, they sometimes remove the talks after they’ve passed, so if you want French or Vietnamese then you should download and save the file (English is archived on the previously mentioned source).

Written transcripts are sometimes difficult to come by due to the work load involved with transcribing and editing. I can’t recommend an English source, but our brothers and sisters in France have been posting French transcripts online.

That’s my summary of Thich Nhat Hanh dharma talk sources across the internets. I hope you can find what you’re interested in seeing or hearing. Listening to all the talks has been a great source of nourishment for me and I will try to share a highlight here and there.

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What do you think?

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