Tuesday, May22nd

This sitting is cancelled as the space is flooded again.

 

For next Tuesday we will be listening to a talk about Receptive Awareness by Andrea Fella that you can find at these links: download or stream

 

A reminder that the hindrance of the month is sensual desire so please pay attention to how that enters your life, if it does…

 

We meet at BIBS and the schedule is:

6:00 – 6:30 sitting
6:30 – 7:15 discussion
7:15 – 7:30 sitting

You are welcome to come for all or part of the evening. Please tread softly when entering during a sitting period…

Tuesday, May 15th

Another third Tuesday comes around and we will be sitting, walking and sitting – the evening will be silent. No discussion is planned, so no reading.

The schedule is:

6:00 – 6:30 sitting
6:30 – 7:00 walking
7:00 – 7:30 sitting

We meet at BIBS – location in the sidebar.

…

For our monthly book group we are reading Unhindered by Gil Frondsal and this month we are studying the chapter on Sensual Desire. This contains several practices for working with desire so if you want to give yourself time to experiment with these practices you might read it now rather than the week before the discussion.

Here are some other resources on the Hindrances:

Dharma talks– https://www.audiodharma.org/series/1/talk/1808/

Handouts/Reflections–http://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/books-articles/articles/the-five-hindrances-handouts/

Tuesday, May 8th

We’ll be continuing our exploration of self-compassion this Tuesday. There are several exercises on the Wikipedia page for Self-compassion, here are a couple:

How would you treat a friend?

This exercise asks you to imagine that you are comforting a close friend who is going through a tough situation. You are then asked to compare and contrast how you react internally to your own struggles, and to endeavour applying the same loving kindness to yourself that you would apply to a friend.

Identifying what we really want

In this exercise, you are asked to think about the ways that you use self-criticism as a way to motivate yourself. Then, you are asked to try to come up with a kinder, gentler and more caring way of motivating yourself to make the desired change, and to try to be aware of how you use self-criticism as a motivational tool in the future.

There are many more resources on the web, have fun exploring…

You can think of death bitterly or with resignation, as a tragic interruption of your life, and take every possible measure to postpone it. Or, more realistically, you can think of life as in interruption of an eternity of nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.

Barbara Ehrenreich (Natural Causes)

The schedule is:

6:00 – 6:30 sitting
6:30 – 7:00 walking
7:00 – 7:30 sitting

We meet at BIBS – location in the sidebar.