These excerpts were taken from a program offered by Christina at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in September of1999. Samatha is a Pali word meaning stillness, tranquility or calm. Samatha practice involves a sustained, unwavering attentiveness to a single focus or object. Whenever the attention is drawn to other thoughts, sensations or sounds, one simply lets go of them, and attention returns to the object. In the deepest development of samatha, the absorption states, there is a … [Read more...]
Christina Feldman
Making a Joyful Effort
Christina Feldman has been a dharma teacher for many years and is the author of several books. The founder and guiding teacher of Gaia House in Devon, England, she teaches regularly at both IMS and BCBS. These remarks have been taken from a talk given at IMS in February of 2003. This evening I’d like to speak about joy in the practice and about joyful effort. Meditation is never meant to be approached as an ordeal, a grim task of chipping away at a rock face. The Buddha once said that this … [Read more...]
Dependent Origination
This article has been excerpted from a program offered by Christina at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies on October 18,1998. Please note that this represents only a small portion of the material offered in the full program. In the Buddha's teachings, the second noble truth is not a theory about what happens to somebody else, but is a process which is going on over and over again in our own lives—through all our days, and countless times every single day. This process in Pali is called … [Read more...]
Seeing the Wheel, Stopping the Spin
As the morning star rose and the Buddha achieved his great insight, tradition tells us, he saw all at once the matrix of causes and conditions that result in human experience: a swirl of interdependent physical and mental events repeating over and over, creating dukkha (suffering). Because he saw so clearly, he also saw how to end the suffering: nibbāna. One could stop the spinning cycle forever. Its dynamic nature—its seeming strength—was also the gate to freedom. One of the most important … [Read more...]
Insight is Liberating Only If It is Lived
How did you first become interested in Buddhist practices? I first began my practice in the Tibetan sedition in 1970. By a strange set of circumstances I ended up in India at 17. Totally culture shocked, I sat in a dingy hotel room in old Delhi and wondered how quickly I could get out of India. An old India hand advised me to head for the mountains to recover before I fled. Arriving in McLeod Ganj, the home of the Dalai Lama and a large settlement of Tibetan refugees. I was stunned by the … [Read more...]
