Inspired after my first jhana learning experience to explore states that require deeper concentration, I attended a retreat with a teacher in Pa-Auk Sayadaw’s lineage earlier this year. The instructions were simple: keep awareness on one point of the breath (slightly outside the nostrils), balance effort and ease, and the jhanas will arise when conditions are right. In this lineage, absorption is so strong such that, even from the first…
The moment was gone; he saw it going. He did not try to hold on to it. He knew he was part of it, not it of him. He was in its keeping. – Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed I love coming across the Dharma in unexpected places. This quote, describing a physicist’s startling vision into a theory he had spent his entire career chasing, made me pause and…
November marked the completion of a long-awaited bucket list item: I visited Plum Village! Nestled near Bordeaux in southwest France, this mindfulness practice center was the home of the late Vietnamese Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh, founder of the Plum Village tradition that I have been part of for more than ten years. Two conditions coincided to make this the right time for the trip: a good friend’s invitation and…
A feeling I had not experienced before visited during sitting meditation. I have heard whispers of it for a few days now – while ambling along the river in the neighborhood, while listening to a talk at my local meditation center – before it arrived in full force one morning. It was the feeling that, for anything that arose, be it a thought, a sight, a sound, it was impossible…
It was 5:57 am. I stared at the screen, mouse hovering over the “refresh” button. Only 3 minutes until registration opens. I took a deep breath at 5:59, then, as the clock turned to 6:00, hit “refresh” to reveal the sign-up link. Click, type, click, click, lurch of the heart as the page loads… I was in! In three months, I will head to the other side of the world…
I was pleasantly surprised that I could still enter jhanas in daily life, where there are fewer supportive conditions than the retreat. On days with a mind not too occupied with work or scattered by too much social media, I could shift from access concentration to first jhana, to second, third, fourth, then practice insight meditation. On days when the mind is all over the place, I could still practice…
Each morning, we were introduced to a new insight practice to experiment with. The practice that surprised me the most was noticing vedanā – the pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feeling tones that come with every experience. We all on some level have noticed that feelings, no matter their “tone”, are impermanent. You don’t need to be a Buddhist to know that. We all have had mornings that started with lethargy…
“The most important thing in learning the jhanas,” began Dharma teacher Leigh Brasington, looking out to a roomful of eager meditators draped in a rainbow of shawls and jackets, “is to not have any expectations.” Well, I certainly checked that box. When I signed up for this retreat, titled “Jhanas and Insights”, taught by Leigh Brasington and Rachael O’Brien, I only had a vague intention to improve my concentration. My…
A reminder from The Noble Search sutta dropped into my mind as I sat down to meditate. It came from this passage: And what is the noble search? Here someone being himself subject to birth, having understood the danger in what is subject to birth, seeks the unborn supreme security from bondage, Nibbāna; being himself subject to ageing, having understood the danger in what is subject to ageing, he seeks…
That’s it. That’s the story. A simple act that I would recall again and again as the answer to why Plum Village is my home tradition. It happened when I was with a small group of Plum Village practitioners, ranging from senior monastic Dharma teachers to lay people who only met their first Plum Village monastic this week. We had just finished offering a mindfulness music event – music, poems,…