This eight-week online course offers an opportunity to develop and strengthen our inner resources of kindness, compassion, calm and clarity, through an exploration of what are traditionally known as “the four heavenly messengers.”
In Buddhist teaching, these are four archetypes that symbolise the existential challenges we face, and the way to overcome those challenges. The four are a sick person, an aged person, a dying person, and a contemplative. In addition to these four, we can also include the current challenges of the climate crisis and racial and social injustice.
At first glance, these messengers might not sound so heavenly, but by learning how to relate to their messages skilfully, they can help us to live our lives with more ease, happiness, and peace.
Each two-hour class will include a short dharma talk, some silent meditation practice, dyad (pairs) practice, and small group discussion. The course will use the Canvas online platform to provide talk recordings, guided meditations, and additional reading.
This course is best suited to people who have sat at least one seven-day silent meditation retreat, but prior Buddhist study is not necessary. Some of the material may be challenging for people who have recently experienced a bereavement or other life stressors, so please feel free to contact Jill if you have any questions about this.
NOTE:Because this is a group learning process, participants are asked to make a commitment to attend all eight sessions of the course, and to allow at least two hours a week for personal study and reflections to be shared with the group. Each week there will be an assignment in the form of a short written reflection, and a response will be required to access the next week’s resources.
*The registration fee covers only a contribution to course administration, and booking fees. In keeping with Buddhist tradition, the teachings are offered on a dana basis which means the teacher is not paid to offer this workshop. Instead, they rely on the generosity of the participants to help them continue to share their teachings with others, and there will be an opportunity at the end of each class to offer donations to support their ongoing teaching.
In the Buddha’s teachings, karuna is a Pali word that means compassion. There’s a lot going on around the world right now, and due to coronavirus, many people are navigating intense suffering on multiple levels simultaneously: The suffering of health challenges, food insecurity, financial distress, longer-term economic uncertainty, separation from friends and family – or having to be with friends and family in ways that are stressful!
Given that social contagion works not only in relation to anxiety, but to positive mind-states too, I hope that in whatever ways we can, this coronavirus situation can be used to spread karuna-compassion to all who need it, including ourselves.
Personally, I have just landed in the UK a couple of days ago and am in social isolation and lockdown in Birmingham. I’m still getting myself set up here, but I wanted to at least offer a few resources for helping reduce the stress and anxiety that so many people are dealing with right now. I’ll keep adding more resources as I find them, and please send me links to any that you might have found helpful.
If anyone would like an individual meeting online to talk about your meditation practice in these challenging times, you can make a booking on my booking calendar now. As usual, these meetings are on a dana basis, but if money is an issue at the moment it’s fine to still meet with me.
I will also be converting some of my planned retreats into online offerings, so please check my revised teaching schedule on this page.
A few selected resources to support karuna-compassion
Among my academic colleagues and friends, I have observed a common response to the continuing Covid-19 crisis. They are fighting valiantly for a sense of normalcy — hustling to move courses online, maintaining strict writing schedules, creating Montessori schools at their kitchen tables. They hope to buckle down for a short stint until things get back to normal. I wish anyone who pursues that path the very best of luck and health. Yet as someone who has experience with crises around the world, what I see behind this scramble for productivity is a perilous assumption. The answer to the question everyone is asking — “When will this be over?” — is simple and obvious, yet terribly hard to accept. The answer is never. Global catastrophes change the world, and this pandemic is very much akin to a major war. Even if we contain the Covid-19 crisis within a few months, the legacy of this pandemic will live with us for years, perhaps decades to come. It will change the way we move, build, learn, and connect. There is simply no way that our lives will resume as if this had never happened. And so, while it may feel good in the moment, it is foolish to dive into a frenzy of activity or obsess about your scholarly productivity right now. That is denial and delusion. The emotionally and spiritually sane response is to prepare to be forever changed.
Judson Brewer – US Neuroscientist and Addiction Psychiatrist
2020-03-14 Coronavirus and the support of the Dharma – Part 1 31:38 We are living through an unusual period. As coronavirus spreads, much of what we take for granted is being shaken. There is uncertainty and fear around us, and also within us. How can Dharma teachings and practices support us? How can we deepen understanding and compassion in the midst of it all? This talk offers reflections on possibilities that are available to us, including practices that we can engage with, lean into, and cultivate.
Tara Brach – US meditation teacher
2020-03-18 Facing Pandemic Fears with an Awake Heart 59:14 While it’s natural to feel fear during times of great collective crisis, our challenge is that fear easily takes over our lives. This talk explores how the mindfulness and compassion of the RAIN meditation can help us find an inner refuge in the face of fear, and deepen our loving connection with each other.
More talks on cultivating resilience in challenging times here
A beautiful video – Letter from the Virus
Stop, just stop Halt … stop … don’t move It’s not a request any more, it’s an obligation I’m here to help you This supersonic rollercoaster has run off its rails and can’t go on any further Stop the planes, trains, schools, shopping malls, gatherings We broke the frenetic vortex of illusions and obligations that stopped you from looking at the sky Look at the stars, listen to the sea Let yourself be rocked by the chirping of birds Roll in the grass Pick an apple from a tree Smile to an animal in the woods Breathe the mountains Listen to your common sense We had to break it You can’t play God Our obligations are mutual, like they’ve always been Even though you’ve forgotten We’ll now stop this broadcast This endless cacophonous sounds of separations and distractions, to tell you this: We’re not OK None of us is We’re all suffering Last year, the firestorms that set the lungs of the earth on fire didn’t stop you Nor did the melting of the poles Or your sinking cities Or the simple acknowledgement of being the sole responsibility for the sixth mass extinction You didn’t listen to me It’s difficult to listen while being so busy Struggling to climb higher and higher On the scaffolding of comforts you are creating for yourself Now the foundations are crumbling They’re collapsing under the weight of your fictitious desires I’ll help you I’ll light the firestorms inside your body I’ll drown your lungs I’ll isolate you like a polar bear on a melting iceberg Will you listen to me then? We’re not OK I’m not your enemy I’m just a messenger I’m an ally I’m the force that will rebalance everything Now you have to listen to me I’m screaming for you to stop Stop, hush, listen Now look up to the sky How is it? There are no more airplanes How healthy do you need to be to enjoy the oxygen you breathe? Look at the ocean How is it? Look at the rivers How are they? Look at the earth How is she? Now look at yourselves How do you feel? You can’t be healthy in a sick ecosystem Stop!!! Many people are afraid now Don’t demonise your fear Don’t let it control you Let it speak to you Listen to the wise words it has to say Learn to smile with your eyes I’ll help you … if you’re willing to listen
Text: Darinka Montico
Voice: Giulia Chianes
A list of ‘good news’ websites compiled by Wendy Nash, Australia
… The mantra “safety first” comes from a value system that makes survival top priority, and that depreciates other values like fun, adventure, play, and the challenging of limits. … The surrounding culture, however, lobbies us relentlessly to live in fear, and has constructed systems that embody fear. In them, staying safe is over-ridingly important. Thus we have a medical system in which most decisions are based on calculations of risk, and in which the worst possible outcome, marking the physician’s ultimate failure, is death. Yet all the while, we know that death awaits us regardless. A life saved actually means a death postponed.
The ultimate fulfillment of civilization’s program of control would be to triumph over death itself. Failing that, modern society settles for a facsimile of that triumph: denial rather than conquest. Ours is a society of death denial, from its hiding away of corpses, to its fetish for youthfulness, to its warehousing of old people in nursing homes. Even its obsession with money and property – extensions of the self, as the word “mine” indicates – expresses the delusion that the impermanent self can be made permanent through its attachments. All this is inevitable given the story-of-self that modernity offers: the separate individual in a world of Other. Surrounded by genetic, social, and economic competitors, that self must protect and dominate in order to thrive. It must do everything it can to forestall death, which (in the story of separation) is total annihilation.
Matthias Horx – an influential futurist in the German-speaking world
The Post Corona World … A massive loss of control suddenly turns into a veritable intoxication of the positive. After a period of bewilderment and fear, an inner strength arises. The world „ends“, but with the experience that we are still there, a kind of new being arises from inside us. In the middle of civilisation’s shutdown, we run through forests or parks, or across almost empty spaces. This is not an apocalypse, but a new beginning. This is how it turns out: Change begins as a changed pattern of expectations, perceptions and world connections. Sometimes it is precisely the break with routines, the familiar, that releases our sense of the future again. The idea and certainty that everything could be completely different — and even better.
I’m unexpectedly having to spend more time here in New Zealand, after my nine-day retreat outside of Sydney over New Year was just cancelled due to the bushfires in Australia.
The Blue Mountains has been a kind of second home to me, so I’ve been staying in contact with friends there who have been sending me heart-breaking reports of the situation they’re enduring.
In the face of such intense destruction, it’s hard to know how to respond from afar, but I’ve decided to make a commitment to practice compassion every day for the next two weeks, and to send out this message to see if anyone would like to join me in that commitment.
(Originally I was just going to send this message to people in Australia, but a US friend asked to be included, so now I’m sending it to everyone on my mailing list in case you’d like to join us.)
My plan is to sit for 15 minutes every day at 1:00 pm NZT, which is 11:00 am Sydney and Melbourne, 10:30 am Adelaide, 10:00 am Brisbane, and 8:00 am Perth. That’s midnight in the UK, sorry, but 4 pm on the US West Coast and 7 pm on the US East Coast.
I’ve made a fifteen minute guided meditation that focuses on practising compassion specifically for the bushfire situation, which you can find on Dharmaseed here: https://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/637/talk/60035/
Of course, you can practice compassion in any way that works for you. And, depending on the situation and how your heart feels each day, it may be that one of the other brahmavihara practices might be more appropriate. If you’re not familiar with brahmavihara practice, you might listen to this talk which gives an overview of the relationship between kindness, compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity. https://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/637/talk/58585/
Wombat mother and baby, Newnes Plateau NSW
What’s been happening in Australia
For those who might not be aware of the situation, more than four million hectares of Australia have burned and nine people have died since September 2019, in an “unprecedented” start to the summer fire season.
New South Wales
The total area burned in NSW is 3.41m hectares, according to the Rural Fire Service. … “To put it in perspective, in the past few years we have had a total area burned for the whole season of about 280,000 ha,” RFS spokeswoman Angela Burford said. “This year we’re at 3.41m and we are only halfway through the season.” https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/24/australian-bushfires-the-story-so-far-in-each-state
A still from the video of an impressive moonrise in early 2013, over Mount Victoria Lookout in Wellington, New Zealand by Mark Gee
Impermanence
This month’s full moon post is a little late, because just this morning, I finished co-teaching the last six weeks of the three-month retreat at IMS in Barre, Massachusetts.
The ending of any period of intensive meditation practice is poignant, but even more so when it’s been a longer retreat. As this retreat was drawing to a close, I started to felt even less articulate than usual! It’s been hard to find words that might capture something of the power of the profound transformations that I had the honour to witness, as I accompanied the meditators at least some of the way on their inner journeys.
Part of the struggle has been a sense of paradox: a feeling that the heart-mind has become both vastly expansive, and completely intimate. So when a friend sent me the link to this short video of a supermoon rising, I was very happy, because perhaps these images might convey what my own words can’t …
Next Step Dharma – online course by Oren Sofer and Jaya Rudgard
For anyone wondering how to access support for the transition from retreat practice to daily life, my friends Oren and Jaya have a six week online course specifically designed to help bring your retreat back home.
The course comprises:
• 21 short Dharma Talks and 16 Guided Meditations, all geared for integration
• 18 Recorded interviews with founding Insight Meditation teachers
• 8 weeks of interactive, live Q & A Sessions with the Course Leaders
• Mentoring for your meditation practice
• Weekly readings and “Core Integration” practices
• Lifetime membership in our online community
Do not chase after what is gone,
Nor yearn for what is yet to be.
For the past has been left behind,
And the future cannot be reached.
Those states that are before you now —
Have insight into every one!
Invincibly, unshakably,
Know that well, again and again.
Do this work today, with ardor;
Who knows when death will come calling?
There is no bargaining with Death,
Or with his army of minions.
Abiding ardently like this
Without fail, both day and night, is
“The single most precious moment.”
So the peaceful sage has told us.
Quoted in “Older and Wiser: Classical Buddhist Teachings on Aging, Sickness, and Death”
by Mu Soeng, Gloria Ambrosia, Andrew Olendzki
Finally, here’s a link to the last talk I gave at the end of the retreat. It has an overview of the core teachings and ways to put them into practice in daily life, using the ten parami of generosity, renunciation, ethical conduct, wisdom, energy, patience, truthfulness, resolve, kindness, and equanimity. I hope it will be helpful whether you’re a beginning meditator, or an experienced practitioner.
