Dharma Talks

This mindfulness teaching helps us study our human tendency to develop and cling to a separate self, the source of much suffering. In the classical teachings, we humans interpret our experience through the simultaneous workings of body (senses and sense objects), feeling tone (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral), perception (labels, expectations), mental formations (decisions based on impulse, past conditioning, mind-states, narrative), and consciousness (simple awareness). Observ

The Satipatthana Sutta names the five hindrances as sense desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, worry and restlessness, and skeptical doubt. These hindrances to meditation reinforce the habit of a separate self. However karmic habits show up on the cushion, they invite us to be curious and investigate. When we know our hindrances and are not distracted by them, we open to the fresh experience of the present moment, dissolving the usual barriers.

Mindfulness of mind is the liberating heart of practice. The three orientations of mind—grasping, aversion and confusion—are natural, human problem-solving reactions to the world. They drive our behavior and create much suffering. Yet when we bring awareness to these primal energies, embrace them lovingly, and see them as cries for inner healing, the bodhisattva arises: greed transforms to generosity, hatred transforms to loving-kindness, and delusion transforms to clear-seei

The Vedana , or feeling tone, of an experience is the instinctual sorting of that experience into a category: pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. Most of the time we are not aware that we sort our experiences like this, but the feeling tone nevertheless guides our actions in the world. When we become mindful of this largely unconscious sorting, we see into impermanence, let go of the idea of the separate self, and cultivate equanimity.

The Buddha’s teaching encourages us to recognize and practice letting go of the idea of the body, the abstract picture of appearance and boundaries. We are invited to feel into sensation and the body’s own language: mysterious, ungraspable, and always in motion.

Mindfulness is a radical act of focusing the attention onto the present moment without judgment. When we cultivate awareness, we bring the practice off the cushion into everyday life. In the Sutra on the Four Establishments of Mindfulness  from the Pali canon, the Buddha instructs his disciples to begin all mindfulness practice with the breath. Let us “go to the forest, to the foot of the tree, or an empty room,” and breathe.

Seido talks about the four foundations of mindfulness as essential preparation for the realization of shikantaza. Included are samplings...