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What follows is a response to a query from my last posting: ‘How do you brighten the mind?’ The question isn’t an unusual one, and that in itself says something. Despite hundreds of years of human development, improvement in terms of health, communications, opportunities for travel, let alone a deluge of commodities, the mind often remains a gloomy or barren space… Continue reading article

This interview is reprinted with permission from the Spirit Rock Meditation Center website. Spirit Rock: Why is the cultivation of compassion (karuna) essential to awakening? DaRa Williams: There is a non-acknowledgment around the fact that the two go hand-in-hand. Awakening is not a separate state of being that comes into existence without the cultivation of the heart […]

An article by Janice Cittasubha Sheppard on the theme for the October 2017 retreat.

Like many who grew up in the 1950s, I have happy memories of playing ping-pong in our basement ‘rec room’ and of hearing my father’s stories about his skill as a ping-pong master when he was young. Playing ping-pong is fun, but having a mind and heart that swings back and forth like a ping-pong ball is decidedly not fun.

It can take some time, even decades, to notice that swinging between peaks and valleys of emotion, attention, energy, effort, etc. is exhausting. Our attachment to the peaks sometimes has obscured the truth of the equal and opposite valleys. Or sometimes we have decided that there must be a way to get the peaks without the valleys and we just have to figure out what it is. But slowly, with time, we come to realize …
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