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Unless otherwise indicated on our calendar, we gather to sit in stillness from 10:45 until 11:15. The sitting is followed by a discussion or a short dharma talk. The talk is followed by 10 minutes of movement meditation and then there is a short opportunity for questions and discussion.
Starting January 19th, 2024, we will begin a 10-week closed course sequence to offer MBSR and More. This is an expansion of the classic stress reduction course developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at U-Mass Medical School. The teachings in this course have been shown to significantly reduce stress, anxiety and depression as well as promote a variety of signs of physical signs of good health.
Sunday Mornings 10:45 - 12:00
106 Marshall Court, Unit 120
Wilmington, North Carolina 28411
(just behind Bayshore Dental Excellence at 7643 Market Street).
December 15, 2024 - January 12, 2025
We have completed the 12 week course on Core Teachings of the Buddha and until January 19th when we begin the MBSR and More class, we will be spending our Sunday mornings exploring this classic Buddhist text. Wikipedia offers this description. "The Dhammapada is a collection of sayings of the Buddha in verse form and one of the most widely read and best known Buddhist scriptures. One version of the Dhammapada is in the Khuddaka Nikaya, a division of the Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism." The plan is to simply start at the beginning and eventually work our way through the entire text. We want to keep the space open for ongoing practice and discussion but we also acknowledge the responsibility involved in providing the space and the leadership to do that. The book study format will allow flexibility on the levels of both attendance and leadership. After the meditation, we will read and compare translations and spend some time discussing and sharing experiences of the teaching outlined by the text for that week.
There are many free translations of this text on-line and the library has a couple as well but I am recommending this version from Gil Fronsdal. Bhikkhu Sujato at Sutta Central also presents a side by side English-Pali Version so if you are interested in a deeper exploration of the language, that website presents the original Pali alongside of Sujato's translation.
September 8 - December 8, 2024
The most common request I hear is from someone who wants to know more about Buddhism and asks “Where do I start?” For 2,500 years, Buddhists have been encouraged to study the texts and integrate the practices into their own lives. A multiplicity of sects have developed out of geographical isolation and dependence of local sources who largely taught from texts that had been memorized. The universality of the form of the doctrine as Four Truths and an Eight-Fold Path, reflects the universality and utility/truth of the Buddha’s message. This class will get you started on the path outlined in the earliest layer of texts. Since my original plan, I have scheduled to be out of town on two Sundays so we will meet for the meditations and there will be program with the topic to be announced. The class syllabus is below.
Syllabus
March 3 - August 4, 2024
If you have any interest in learning more about the Indian/Buddhist foundations of the mindfulness practices, this series might interest you. As a now-retired psychologist, I have been interested in the practices that are most strongly supported by research on human behavior as they can be used to enhance personal well-being and promote flourishing. Mindfulness is at the top of that list. You will learn and practice a variety of meditation skills and learn a bit about the three traditions that have contributed to the science of Mindfulness; Psychology, Yoga and Buddhism. Meditation starts at 10:45 and the dharma talk begins at 11:15.
When I began teaching yoga, I looked for a way to teach the psychology and philosophy of yoga along with traditional asana yoga in my classes. I am grateful that Kersten and Monique, the original Porter’s Neck Yoga studio owners where I learned and started teaching, encouraged this exploration beyond the typical fitness focus. I went on to study Mindful Yoga at Spirit Rock, a Buddhist meditation center in California, and discovered the traditional teachings of Buddha that I then began to share. My teachings are always in transition because I am constantly studying, practicing and learning. I have been chasing the meaning of words from ancient India for my talks in my yoga classes for over fifteen years. There are two languages that I have been interested in, Sanskrit and Pali. Sanskrit is the root language for Yoga. Pali is a related language that is becoming more well-known because it is the language of the most complete version of the teachings of the Buddha. The teachings from yoga in the Yoga Sutras, collected some 100 - 500 years later, are in Sanskrit but many early Buddhist texts were also originally in Sanskrit, the language of the Brahmins, the elite religious leaders of the time. Very early on, some of the texts (in oral Sanskrit), were taken to China where they were written down in Chinese. There are parallel versions of the Pali Canon in Chinese that are being explored by scholars to identify similarities and differences, and modern translations of the Chinese are available. There are also fragments from a number of other local languages that can be compared with the whole body of these texts. The internet has become an invaluable resource for exploring these early teachings. I hope you will join me to see what these 2,500 year old teachings offer to our world today.
I like the metaphor in the title of Anne Lamott’s book “Bird by Bird” which is about writing but applies to any project we are working on. Near the end of her second chapter, she retells a story because it is a good story and because everyone with a large project to complete might want to keep it on their desktop for inspiration.
“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was 10 years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put is arm around my brother’s shoulder and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”
Today’s scholars agree that Buddha taught a path of practice, that became a doctrine of beliefs as they were collected and shared. His followers developed his teachings about the path and made a doctrine out of it called Buddhism. Over the last 2,500 years, this doctrine has been given essence, a psychological quality reflecting deep reality. Wikipedia says there 520 million followers of Buddhism as a religion. And yet we find that one of the doctrines is that nothing has essence. Stephen Batchelor, a former monk in both the Tibetan tradition and the Korean Seon tradition, recognized this when he advocated for a secular Buddhism. He has elaborated on this theme in his book After Buddhism which describes a secular view of Buddhist doctrine through the non-monastic characters in the earliest layer of texts. A psychologist, Robert Wright has added to this discussion in his book, Why Buddhism is True. Having studied the early texts myself, I don’t quite buy the secular view. One example is illustrated by the word dhammapada. I have written about the word dhammapada on the Points to Ponder page of this website and proposed that the aspirations to the four dhammapadas; contentment, good will, mindfulness, and meditation, are expressions of a spiritual life. Rather than adopting contentment and good will as doctrines to be believed, the Buddha suggested that doing the practices of mindfulness and concentration will naturally lead to their arising. We are encouraged to try and see for ourselves.
For several of my late pre-teen years, I wished for happiness when I blew out the candles on my birthday cake. Happiness was still on the agenda when I decided to study psychology in college. I was curious to understand human nature and how to be happy. What I discovered is that understanding rocket science is a walk in the park compared to understanding human nature. Anyone can build a space ship to the moon because the laws of nature in the material world are straightforward, and they don’t change on you in the middle of the project. The organic world presents an entirely different situation. Creating a flourishing and happy society involves a lot more variables and they are always changing. The old nature-nurture question is beginning to be untangled but it isn’t free of knots yet. Joseph Henrich's text, The Secret of our Success describes some of these complexities. The core principle is that both individual and cultural survival are driven by the ability to adapt to changes in the environment. Scientists tell us our physical bodies have evolved and changed over hundreds of thousands of years. Our brains have developed the ability to change according to how they are used, what we call experience dependent neuroplasticity. Cultures are changed by environmental factors including climate, diet, prior cultural influences, contact with other cultures, the emergence of creative individuals with novel ideas that become copied and perpetuated, and probably many other as yet unidentified factors. Both individuals and cultures that are better learners, that are more flexible and adaptable, are more likely to be successful in perpetuating themselves. Human and cultural diversity are byproducts of these processes.
As individuals, to be flexible and adaptable, we must be open to the possibility of being incorrect and consider that there might be a more skillful way. Unfortunately, because it is more energy efficient, one of the default biases of our brain is to believe we know things that either we really don’t know (e.g. Sloman and Fernbach) or to believe others who act as if they know (Gladwell). Since the development of the scientific method, our knowledge about human nature has grown because we no longer have the blind conviction that the historical way is always the correct way. This thought pattern, called dichotomous or polarized thinking, is considered a cognitive distortion because it keeps us from seeing the world as it often is: complex, nuanced, and full of all the shades in between. Again, to save energy, the brain tends to create dualities, either right or wrong, black or white. Today, scientists understand that most knowledge about the organic world is in probabilities, e.g. if you wear a mask, you are less likely to get Covid. Getting the vaccine decreases your probability of dying of Covid. Facts no longer carry the same weight because we can see how information can be spun by context as more and more variables are introduced. The Buddha does not seem to have been a black-white thinker. Rather, he advocated a middle way that allowed for the complexities and nuances of individual and cultural differences. Join me to explore these ancient wisdom teachings "word by word".
Our Community Center and Yoga Studio is located at:
106 Marshall Court, Unit 120
Wilmington, North Carolina 28411
(just behind Bayshore Dental Excellence at 7643 Market Street)
Phone: Text or Call (910) 520-6846
Email: admin@bhavanacommunity.org
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