Daily Reflection Sit

Primary emphasis is upon suffering and release from it; The experience of dukkha, is unavoidable, isn’t it? There is a proposed path of practice to address this. NOTE: Our new teaching series began in September with “The Holding Environment: How to Set Up Your Meditation Practice”. To view the beginning of the series, go to the ‘Daily Sit’ page on our website and click on September to start the journey.

In seeing the suffering of an old person, a sick person, a dead person, the prince was moved to find a way out of suffering. Seeing a wandering ascetic, peaceful amidst the crowds and noise, paved the way for his spiritual journey.

The lens of suffering and release from suffering is an optimistic framework. Let’s explore its relevance for us during these troubled times.

Identifying moments of low grade chronic tension and stress

Through patience and mindfulness, our reactivity to dukkha can be transformed from an obstacle into a gateway to freedom and its various expressions. (ft. Guest Dharma Teacher, Dawn Scott)

We have to SEE stress, suffering, unsatisfactoriness in its physical and mental manifestations before we can do anything about it.

We’re wired to try to hold on to things that are inherently impermanent, which causes stress and suffering. Working with this Noble Truth, we hold suffering up to the light and look at it from different angles.

Moving from the hard-heartedness of reactivity to tender compassion through cultivating empathy grounded in the use of our moral imagination.

Whether physical, mental or emotional we need to NOTICE and FEEL the suffering that is here in order to DISCERN if it is leading to release or to more tension.

Recognizing “clinging” in all of its vicissitudes; it is a deep part of our wiring.

How we flee from dukkha and run toward the promise or enchantment of sense pleasure.

Can you see YOU and your preferences and reactions? Can you FEEL the push-pull-holding on around Your Preferences and the YOU that is identified with them? Can you get the subject-object relationship and the “grip” of energy that keeps this attachment alive? This dynamic is the cause of suffering.

Look at causal links of suffering; cause and effect. See craving, see the self rise up and go after what it wants...in the name of a lot of things, with mixed results as an end. Feel it. The gift that mindfulness offers is a path that leads out of suffering, but, as with other spiritual traditions, the path necessarily leads us through suffering, through the “dark night of the soul”, to get to the promised land of peace.

When setting up the practice of mindfulness the instruction reads, “...set mindfulness to fore”, not your own perspective. Shift out of “your view” and into “a non-judgemental, non-self referential posture of caring attention to the experience of well benign right now, in the present moment”.

Where does your inclination lie? What supports settling- body, breath, heart or mind?