Sit@Noon Resumes Jan. 13

Take a bite out of your busy schedule

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Tuesdays 12noon to 1:00pm

30 minutes of sitting meditation interspersed with yoga and walking meditation, followed by tea and discussion.  Feel welcome to bring your lunch.

  • Drop In
  • Free
  • Meditation instruction provided

Meditation: Getting Together with your Mind

“Meditation brings steadiness, calmness, and clarity to our busy, agitated mind. Without the support  of meditation, it would be difficult to succeed at training in discipline. We need a focused, calm and steady mind to see our actions clearly. By training in meditation, we become able to train in discipline.

The question here is, what are we doing in meditation? There are many kinds of meditation, but the primary methods associated with the training in meditation are calm abiding meditation (shamatha) and clear seeing or insight meditation (vipashyana). Calm abiding meditation is sometimes called “resting meditation” or just “sitting meditation”.  It’s an accurate label because we’re not doing much in this practice other than sitting and looking at the mind. Once we’ve learned to calm and stabilize the mind, we’ll be able to practice clear seeing meditation which brings about a deeper level of insight or direct seeing into the mind’s nature…

By being there and just listening, you’ll eventually learn what’s going on with your  mind. You’ll be able to recognize its problems and come up with advice that will hit the spot. If you start diagnosing too soon, your advice will lead nowhere. If you wait to get the full story, then you can guide your mind in a direction that’s productive and beneficial, one that will reduce its pain and relieve its emotional upheavals. However, knowing what will help is one thing, and getting your mind’s cooperation is another. That’s why developing this relationship is so important. If you saw some strange guy on the street doing something stupid and said  “Hey you! don’t do that,” do you think he would listen to you? No, probably not. But if it was someone you knew well and you said, “Hey, friend! Please stop that,” that person would be much more likely to listen to you and to try his best to stop what he was doing. It’s the same with our mind. If your mind is a stranger to you, and from time to time you catch it doing something negative and tell it to stop, it’s not going to listen to you. But once you have developed a relationship and become friends, then your mind will be more workable, more reasonable, more amenable to change. You have a good history and your friend will listen to you.

Just as when you make a new friend, when you develop a genuine, honest and open relationship with your mind, you discover that in spite of everything – the anxieties, struggles and emotional upheavals – there’s something in the heart of it all that’s undeniably positive. There are qualities of goodness, compassion, integrity and wisdom that are apparent through all of your mind’s confusion.”

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche from “Rebel Buddha: on the road to Freedom” Shambhala Publications, 2010

Learn more about weekly meditation practice at Nalandabodhi Halifax and check our calendar for times.

 

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