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Swimming against the stream
Our challenge is to remain lucid, aware, and present. This is Gotama’s injunction and one of his main teachings. To understand this reality means, in traditional Buddhist terms, to understand the middle way, emptiness and not-self. It means entering the stream of the river of life to go against the current.
Pine Street Sangha is 8 years old
Pine Street Sangha is now 8 years old. Located in Portland, Oregon, USA, the sangha is a community of dharma friends and teachers offering a reflective meditation approach based on early Buddhist teaching in support of spiritual development and healing.
Review of Rhonda V. Magee’s ‘The Inner Work of Racial Justice’
This book skillfully weaves together personal stories of Magee and other workshop participants, meditative and reflective practices which help us develop mindfulness and compassion in the context of confronting racism, and an account of how racism affects all of us – people of color as well as those who our society labels as ‘white.’
Touching the earth: exploring a new, secular self-help mindfulness group approach
Touching the Earth groups aspire to treat participants as equals, where no one is paid to lead or facilitate, and each participant takes responsibility for cultivating their own path and for supporting others in cultivating theirs. The basic format involves meditation, journaling one’s meditation experience, and then exploring the meditation in triads.
Meditating in a secular world
Meditative practice enables us to develop a more present, lucid and conscious connection with what surrounds us, in the precise moment and place where we find ourselves. Meditative practice does not take us beyond that present moment in its totality. If anything, it leads us deeper, to union with it.
Interview with Dave Smith on teaching meditation and the Secular Dharma Foundation
Dave Smith is an internationally recognized Buddhist meditation teacher, addiction treatment specialist, and published author. We recently interviewed Dave about his approach to being a meditation teacher and his Secular Dharma Foundation.
An unconventional glossary of Buddhist qualities, translated from meditative experience and Pali
This unconventional glossary provides us with grounded, experienced-based definitions of qualities, attitudes, skills, and concepts which are relevant to all meditators.
Defining secular Buddhism: beware of certain traps
Secular Buddhism doesn’t need to be understood as a new ‘Buddhism’ but more as a different approach to practice. This approach starts from our perspective as modern people, and thanks to this lens, revises the meaning of the teachings of an ancient tradition so that they can speak to human beings today.
New horizons for emerging sanghas: community groups and lay women dharma teachers
In a talk given to the June 2019 Sakyadita Australia conference Anna Markey discusses how there is an emergence of many small community-based clusters of intimate dharma groups in Australia, either leaderless or led by lay teachers. And many of these teachers are women.
What next? two years of path in the Secular Dharma with Bodhi College
Stefano Bettera offers his reflections on the two year course on the Secular Dharma at Bodhi College and what the next steps are for the course participants. He asserts that it is the 'creative, adaptable, non-dogmatic and unorthodox characteristic of the secular Dharma that is an opportunity' for contributing to a culture in which awareness and compassion are predominant.
Ongoing meetings of secular Buddhist groups and sanghas
Workshops, retreats, meetings and other events of interest to secular Buddhists, and the curious
How to be an ecosattva
Acknowledging the importance of social engagement is a big step for many Buddhists, since we have usually been taught to focus on what is happening in our own minds. On the other side, those committed to social action tend to suffer from frustration, anger, and burnout. The engaged bodhisattva path provides what each needs because it involves a double practice, inner and outer, each reinforcing the other.
On freedom and nirvana
A moment of freedom is a freedom from something, but it’s also a freedom to something. It’s not just that you’re freed from something, let’s say, attachment or anger or self-centredness, but that that freedom clears a space to act in a way that is not conditioned by your anger or self-centredness.
Secular Dharma Foundation: Educational tools & resources
The mission of the Secular Dharma Foundation is to foster the advancement of emotional and psychological well-being through the education and integration of mindfulness, psychology, and various therapeutic modalities.
The wanderer stilled: Martine Batchelor on meditation
Martine Batchelor discusses how concentration and experiential enquiry are the two basic elements of all forms of Buddhist meditation.
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