​Due to cultural conditioning, many of us find it difficult to imagine the potential of our minds to experience the sure heart’s release from suffering.  However, the message of the Buddha was clear – each of us has this innate capacity for freedom.  The path of awakening the Buddha identified is a natural process leading to non-clinging, intuitive wisdom, and deep compassion for ourselves and others.  In order to make space for the liberative process to emerge more fully, we need to understand the mind’s potential and recondition ourselves to be free of false, self-limiting views and mind-states.
 
In this four-week class, we will explore the process of liberation that unfolds in our practice as we naturally, sequentially cultivate the wholesome qualities of mind known as the seven factors of awakening: mindfulness, investigation (of physical and mental experiences), energy, tranquility, rapture (rapt attention), concentration, and equanimity.  We will begin and end this four-week class by exploring awakening itself and what awakening means for each of us.

Join Tara for The Seven Factors of Awakening beginning on Monday, November 18, 7:15pm.

By Manny Mansbach

We humans tend to seek certain kinds of pseudo-refuge in the familiar, focusing on landing in a place that is known, seems safe and secure. We can become off-balance, disoriented, anxious, even afraid while waiting for what we think will be easier, until the employer calls with the job offer or the weather turns more to our liking, or we reach a new understanding with someone we’ve been in conflict with. There is value, we tell ourselves, in sailing in open, unprotected waters, but often we find ourselves longing for the refuge of the harbor.

There’s nothing at all wrong with returning to the safe harbor of the known, but when we have difficulty finding ease in the gaps between our comfort zones there can be wide swaths of life that become uncomfortable. Depending on how we relate to these “in-between” places, we may be mildly, moderately or severely vexed. If the distress is habitual, socially embarrassing, strongly identified with or reinforces a negative self-esteem loop, then it can become quite limiting or even debilitating.

Finding ease and freedom in these “in-between” places can be some of  the most difficult and most important work of our practice. This talk will offer some direction for how we can “mind the gap” and struggle less when we are asked by life to swim in deeper water than we like or are accustomed to.

Join Manny and other sangha members for a sitting at 7:00pm and talk at 7:35pm.​