Part 4 of 4 If you’ve been following this series over the past three weeks, we’ve been taking a very rudimentary look into the first three of the most basic and most fundamental of all Buddhist teachings: the Four Noble Truths. This fourth post brings us to Buddha’s prescription for how we embark on the […]
You don’t need me to tell you that what is going on around many parts of the world is destructive, chaotic, unkind, and even sinister. All we need to do is turn on the news for five minutes to feel the weight of despair. Disease, war, oppression, discrimination, climate change, violence, intolerance, and unrest. What does […]
Are you feeling stuck, unmotivated and uninspired? Take your ego mind out of the equation! In Buddhism, all of the physical and emotional obstacles can be very powerful teachers. If we allow ourselves to get caught up in the daily minutiae and stressors in our daily lives, it can almost be impossible for us to […]
We are excited to welcome honored Tibetan Buddhist monk the Venerable Zawa Tulku Rinpoche back to Satsang House! In addition to teaching and performing empowerment ceremonies, Rinpoche is also a master of the construction of sand mandalas and ritual arts. Rinpoche will be hand-designing and bringing to life a special mandala during his stay. For […]
Oftentimes, people come to learn how to meditate because their lives have been overtaken by stress, they can’t focus, they can’t sleep, they feel anxious or depressed. These are wonderful reasons to begin a meditation practice. But meditation is much more than a good feeling. It is the union of body, mind, and spirit. Most […]
Wouldn’t it be great if we could simply sit down on our little cushion to meditate? Instantly drop into the stillness, our internal chatter quieted, our bodies relaxed, not a care in the world? No doubt it would! But it doesn’t happen like that. But did you know that meditation changes your brain? It takes a bit […]
One of the greatest benefits of meditation is it allows us to stop the insanity of our daily lives. Have you ever stopped to notice how we are caught up in an endless tug-of-war with the way things are? Think about how easy it is to be driven out of the present moment by our own […]
It’s tough to acknowledge our distress and admit our vulnerability. Instead, it’s so much easier to allow ourselves to fall into whatever story we have been telling ourselves on repeat than to stay with our experience. The way you speak to yourself matters. What are the messages you've been sending to yourself? Take responsibility for the […]
If we walk around believing everything we think without question, particularly the not so pleasant self-doubting thoughts, it’s pretty hard to see any other viewpoint than our own. If we tell ourselves certain things about ourselves long enough, it may never even occur to us to question our own thinking.
Consider that most of your mental suffering actually comes from how tightly you hold on to your beliefs. What if you were to discover that your stories do not fully define who you are and what is actually happening to you? With mindfulness, we can step out of the story we tell and simply notice the telling of the story.