Kevin: One retreat, someone asked Shinzen his thoughts on how it was that some people ‘wake up’ without any practice*. While the most of us seem to need hours, days, years, decades of consistent dedicated practice, others don’t! It’s just naturally there, or spontaneously occurs without any practice whatsoever. Shinzen answered that, if he were to … Continued
Kevin: ‘You can’t take it with you’, ‘This too shall pass’, ‘The only constant is change’, and so on. Impermanence. We understand the idea. Makes sense, right? It’s baked into the condition of life itself! But how much frustration, anxiety, and suffering do we experience because we don’t really accept it? We fight against the arising … Continued
Kevin: To paraphrase Oliver Burkeman, from a certain perspective we can say that our lives are made up of what we pay attention to. And I’d go so far as to add that it also consists of how we pay attention! I’ve noticed, over the course of that past several years (or decades?) that I’ve developed the habit of … Continued
Kevin: Loving Kindness practices are one way to nurture connection; we wish all beings to be well. But what if by ‘all beings’ we mean everything that comes into being in our experience! Tonight we will practice the loving affirmation of everything in our experience, and see if allowing it all to come and go … Continued
Kevin: Generally, when we talk about ‘waking up’, we’re talking about seeing through the delusions, illusions, fabrications, and projections we unwittingly make and call ‘reality’. ‘Waking up’ starts with learning how to pay attention to what’s happening in our experience, and appreciating how even our thoughts, beliefs, memories, and even sense of self occur as sensory … Continued