As an Urban Community Dharma Center we are continually balancing our mission to provide access to these powerful teachings with our challenges to be financially resilient as a not-for-profit organization. We have a commitment that no one is turned away from the teachings for lack of funds and have an open scholarship policy that ensures that our programs remain accessible to all.
In the Satipatthana Sutta, the root text in which the Buddha gives detailed instructions for practicing Mindfulness, he promises that following those instructions precisely and diligently for even as little as seven days will lead to freedom. Wow!! This gets my attention.
Isn’t it wonderful that this week we as a country pause to celebrate a holiday devoted to gratitude and giving thanks! We collectively agree to focus on the quality of mind that the Buddha cited as defining what it means to be civilized. In fact, he said it was rare to find in the world people who 1) are first to do a kindness, and 2) who are grateful and thankful for kindness done.
Our human life will never be without sorrows, struggles or difficulties. The Buddha called our mixed bag of sorrows, beauty, joy and great difficulties, the eight worldly winds: gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disrepute. It is possible to discover Equanimity, the seventh factor of awakening, not apart from, but in the midst of these changing winds.
The fourth factor of Awakening is Piti—the third of the uplifting or energizing factors along with Investigation and Energy.
On the night of the Buddha’s awakening, he vowed: “I shall not give up my efforts until I have attained liberation by perseverance, energy and endeavor.” I imagine from this, that he was singly focused on liberation, with the wherewithal to apply all of his energy to it.
Last week, we recommitted to our practice of Mindfulness, the first of the Seven Factors of Awakening (qualities of mind/heart that lead to awakening). From these mental factors an awakened perspective emerges.
Not long ago my parents decided to sell their country place. It was a house I spent part of my childhood in, and one we used on weekends. When I was younger and less firmly urbanized I even thought I wanted to live there. Its loss means the loss of part of my past, as well as the loss of a place at which we enjoyed spending time.
At the recent International Vipassana Teachers’ meeting, “Earth Care Week” was born. Each year, during the first week of October, teachers and members of the greater community will come together to celebrate our planet and engage with environmental issues, including climate change. We will explore ways to bring care for the Earth into our practice.
This past January, I joined five other educators for the 2013 Certificate Program in Mindfulness for Educators, jointly sponsored by the Center for Mindful Inquiry (Brattleboro, VT), the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, and the Antioch University New England Center for School Renewal. The program includes bookend weekend retreats in January and December, a five-day mid-summer study retreat, and numerous readings from Buddhist and educational sources that are written and dialogued about both on retreat and in online forums. The learning community that has formed amongst the cohort of educators, the two principal teachers, and the two assistant teachers is joyfully unlike anything I have experienced.
