Upcoming Schedule

Tuesday, December 16 - NO GROUP due to Family Emergency

Tuesday, December 23 - NO GROUP due to Holidays

Tuesday, December 30 - Walt Opie & Special Ritual
Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - Walt Opie

The Four Principles of Mindful Transformation (taken from The Wise Heart by Jack Kornfield)

RAIN (technique for looking at our difficulties):

1 – Recognize (pause & step out of denial for true freedom from suffering—name and inwardly bow to our experience—“ah, the judging mind…”)

2 – Accept (relax & open to the facts before us, not passive; Say, “This too.”)

3 - Investigate [body, feeling tone, mind & dharma] (also called "seeing deeply"; Jack Kornfield says, “Whenever we are stuck, it is because we have not looked deeply enough into the nature of the experience.”)

4 - Non-Identify (notice how we identify it as “me” or “mine” + awareness)

Upcoming Schedule

Tuesday, July 8 - Walt Opie
Tuesday, July 15 - Jeff Lindemood
Tuesday, July 22 - Walt Opie
Tuesday, July 29 - Walt Opie
Tuesday, August 5 - Walt Opie
Tuesday, August 12 - Walt Opie
Tuesday, August 19 - Walt Opie
Tuesday, August 26 - Walt Opie

Nothing Extra by Joan Halifax

[This is a quote from last week's talk that seemed to resonate with people. -w.o.]

Nothing Extra by Joan Halifax (Zen teacher):

"Some years ago, walking across the Himalayas, I realized I would never make it over those mountains unless I let go of everything extra. That meant I had to lighten up my mind as well as my overloaded daypack. It all came down to one simple sentence: Nothing extra! Just as these two legs carried me across mountains, those same words carry me through complicated days. They always remind me to let go. They also remind me of the weightlessness and ease of a whole and dedicated heart." 

(From "Being With Dying," by Joan Halifax Shambhala Publications, 2008. Image below by AniMac.)

A Few Quotes from the Last Talk

Here are a few quotes from last week that people really liked and requested:

From As Bill Sees It:

“We recovered alcoholics are not so much brothers in virtue as we are brothers in our defects, and in our common strivings to overcome them.” –letter by Bill W. in 1946 

From Small Boat, Great Mountain by Ajahn Amaro (pg. 91):
Even when we’re getting the axe internally, such as intense waves of greed or waves of fear and anxiety or waves of nostalgia and longing, it’s that gesture of turning towards these experiences and accepting them as they are that allows the heart to be free. True wisdom, far from being beyond the practice of kindness, actually depends on such undiscriminating acceptance of the beautiful and the ugly alike. When we stop running away from things that are apparently painful, even unbearable, and fully engage in the gesture of acceptance and surrender, there is a magical transformation. We transform the so-called difficulty and move into an entirely different state.

Upcoming Schedule

Tuesday, April 22 - Walt Opie

Tuesday, April 29 - Jeff Lindemood

Tuesday, May 6 - Kevin Griffin

Tuesday, May 13 - Walt Opie

Tuesday, May 20 - Walt Opie

Tuesday, May 27 - Walt Opie 

Acceptance & Serenity: Daylong for People in Recovery at EBMC on 4/13/14

Join Shahara Godfrey and Walt Opie for a daylong at the East Bay Meditation Center (EBMC) in downtown Oakland on April 13, 2014 from 10 am - 5 pm. The topic of this daylong for people in recovery is Acceptance and Serenity. Click here for more information.

During this daylong for people in recovery, we will explore how our Buddhist practices of mindfulness meditation and the four Brahma Viharas (or Divine Abodes), especially Equanimity, can help us cultivate greater acceptance and serenity in our daily lives. No meditation experience is necessary. All are welcome.

Registration: Registration is required and space is limited. Click here or on the link below to register:

http://eastbaymeditation.org/ebmcreg/?event=apr14recovery

Cost: Dana (donation only). There is no registration fee for attending this event.  

Take Refuge in the Island Within Yourself

Here's a link to a talk by Thich Nhat Hanh on the "Island Inside" suggested by Paul from the Berkeley Dharma & Recovery group:

http://youtu.be/1un_agCuMzw

And here's an written excerpt of the talk (with thanks to EricaZen):

There are days when you feel that it’s not your day. Everything goes wrong. And the more effort you make the situation becomes worse. Of course you have gone through days like that in your life. You fail in everything, you suffer, you get angry, people blame you, you are not happy… you are frustrated. And you tell yourself that you have to make more effort, but the more effort you make, the worse the situation becomes. And now it is time to stop everything, it’s time to go home to yourself and take refuge.  You have to close your windows: the eyes, the ears… you should close your windows. You should not be in touch with the outside any more. You have to close the windows of your hermitage because there is a hermitage within yourself that is the island of self that you are going to discover. If you continue to be on the outside, you continue to suffer. That is why in moments like that you have to go home to the island of self. And the first thing you do is exactly the same thing that I did at the hermitage, to close the five windows: Eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, mind. Don’t look, don’t listen, don’t touch, don’t think… stop everything, to prevent the strong wind from the outside to continue to blow in and to make you miserable. Because the eye is a window, the ear is a window, the mind is a window, if you keep them open the wind of disturbance will blow in and make it worse and worse. Don’t try anymore… STOP TRYING and shut the windows, you shut also the door, and you go to the chimney and make a fire. You want to get the feeling of warmth, comfort… by practicing mindful breathing, going home to yourself, and rearrange everything, your feelings, your perceptions, your emotions, how they are all scattered all over, it’s a mess. You can now recognize each feeling, each emotion, and you have to collect them, like I collected the sheets of paper that were scattered a little bit all over. Practice mindfulness and concentration and tidy up everything inside yourself. Everyone has a hermitage within.

Quotes on Doubt & Step Two

NOTE: This week at the group we talked about working with doubt in our meditation practice and as related to Step Two ("Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity"). Below are some quotes I shared related to this topic in case you want to read them for further reflection:

Seeking the Heart of Wisdom by Joseph Goldstein & Jack Kornfield, pg. 35:

Doubt can be the most difficult of all (the hindrances) to work with, because when we believe it and get caught by it, our practice just stops cold. We become paralyzed. All kinds of doubt might assail us; doubts about ourselves and our capacities; doubts about our teachers; doubts about the dharma itself—“Does it really work? I sit here and all that happens is my knees hurt and I feel restless. Maybe the Buddha didn’t really know what he was talking about.” We might doubt the practice or doubt that it is the right practice for us. “It’s too hard. Maybe I should try Sufi dancing.” Or we think it’s the right practice but the wrong time. Or it’s the right practice and the right time, but our body’s not yet in good enough shape. It doesn’t matter what the object is; when the skeptical, doubting mind catches us, we’re stuck.

A Burning Desire by Kevin Griffin, pg. 150:

Ultimately, I think we should be most concerned, not about the accuracy of our beliefs, but about their efficacy. Oftentimes I can’t know if they are true, but I can usually tell if they are helping me or not. And that’s what I want to know. Are my beliefs leading to the end of suffering?

Twelve Steps & Twelve Traditions, pg. 29: 

Now we come to another kind of problem: the intellectually self-sufficient man or woman. To these, many AA’s can say, “Yes, we were like you—far too smart for our own good. We loved to have people call us precocious. We used our education to blow ourselves up into prideful balloons, though we were careful to hide this from others. Secretly, we felt we could float above the rest of the folks on our brainpower alone. Scientific progress told us there was nothing man couldn’t do. Knowledge was all-powerful. Intellect could conquer nature. Since we were brighter than most folks (so we thought), the spoils of victory would be ours for the thinking. The god of intellect displaced the God of our fathers. But again John Barleycorn had other ideas. We who had won so handsomely in a walk turned into all-time losers. We saw that we had to reconsider or die. We found many in AA who once thought as we did. They helped us to get down to our right size. By their example they showed us that humility and intellect could be compatible, provided we placed humility first. When we began to do that, we received a gift of faith, a faith which works. This faith is for you, too.”

A Path with Heart by Jack Kornfield, pg. 160

(The Buddha says:) You may be puzzled, Kalamas, and in doubt, and your doubt has arisen about what should be doubted. Do not believe me either. If you wish to know spiritual truth, you must investigate it this way… (continues on--click here for full sutta)

Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn, pg. 8:

While it may be simple to practice mindfulness, it is not necessarily easy. Mindfulness requires effort and discipline for the simple reason that the forces that work against our being mindful, namely, our habitual unawareness and automaticity, are exceedingly tenacious.