Sunday, March 29

This Sunday, we will recite the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings, which will include some of the ceremonial chanting (Incense Offering, Opening Verse, The Three Refuges, Closing Verse) in the Plum Village tradition.

Sunday, March 15

Pete will facilitate on getting back to basics and focusing on Sitting meditation practice. Those with a copy of “How To Sit” are encouraged to bring it.

Sunday, March 8

Dear Sangha,

Our practice is designed to help us enter reality deeply, with openness, mindfulness and concentration to generate the ultimate fruit of our practice, insight and wellbeing. Buddhism is the practice of salvation through insight, through our own direct experience of awakening. Our practice aims at ultimate knowing which is the intuition of inter-being. The idea of inter-being is not too difficult to understand. Everything is made of everything else in the cosmos and the cosmos as a whole, including the source of the cosmos. It is not too difficult to understand the flower is made of sunshine, rain, clouds, ocean, soil, water, etc. It takes a whole universe to produce a flower and the same is true of us. We can understand this. But to have our experience of ourselves and our world transformed so that this becomes how we experience ourselves and our world, that takes skillful practice, and that is our practice. Enlightenment is the direct intuition of wholeness, the direct “grokking” of reality, unfettered by concepts. It is to be able to maintain this mode of experience as we go through all our activities, not being caught by ideas or pulled out of our absorption in the wholeness of being by fears, worries, memories or anticipations. It is simple, this practice of mindfulness of the present moment in its wholeness and unfolding particulars, but it requires training and practice to overcome deeply ingrained habits of thought and reaction. That is why we need a community of fellow practitioners (Sangha) and a practice (Dharma). It doesn’t just happen. Fortunately we have a great Dharma Teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay), a beautiful Maha-Sangha of monastics and lay practitioners around the world and a thriving, wonderful, local Sangha, the Open Heart Sangha, to share the adventure of a lifetime with. How wonderful!

I look forward to being with you and facilitating our Sangha this Sunday. I will share with you a beautiful teaching from Thay, which he gave at the 21-day retreat last June, on the structure of our mind and how we can do our part to help our mind to generate deep joy, happiness and insight. In the process we will also generate love and compassion to transform the suffering of ourselves, other people, other creatures and the whole earth, who is our mother, our body and our home.

Smiling,

Keith
Universal Emptiness of the HeartTrue Enlightenment Garden