New York Insight Blog

The first instruction for establishing Mindfulness is to know the body, and it begins with focusing on breathing. Even though it’s an essential part of our life support system, we normally give very little attention to the breath, unless there is a problem with it.

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.