Joseph Goldstein is a co-founder and guiding teacher of IMS. He has been teaching vipassanā and mettā retreats worldwide since 1974. In 1989, he helped establish BCBS and, more recently, IMS’s Forest Refuge. He is the author of Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, One Dharma, The Experience of Insight, and Insight Meditation, and co-author of Seeking the Heart of Wisdom. A pdf version can be downloaded here. As challenging as it is, it seems important to explore the meaning and … [Read more...]
Coming Clean on Diversity and Staying in Love with Practice
Insight Journal: I often hear people saying some version of, “I sit 30 minutes a day, but I want to get up to 45.” Or “I sit an hour a day, but I’d like to do two.” Are we missing something when we evaluate practice in this way? Pannavati Bhikkhunī: I think we often misunderstand what striving is. The kind of striving that the Buddha talks about is tied up with the aspiration of the heart, not some external effort like trying harder or putting in more time. It’s more about quality than … [Read more...]
This World Is Not Yours
In a discourse about the teaching of non-self, the Buddha offers the following illustration: “Bhikkhus, what do you think? If people carried off the grass, sticks, branches and leaves in this Jeta Grove, or burned them or did what they liked with them, would you think: ‘People are carrying us off or burning us or doing what they like with us?' No, venerable sir. Why not? Because that is neither our self nor what belongs to our self.” (M 22) As we hear this example today, however, we have to … [Read more...]
Buddhist Psychology: Classical Texts in Contemporary Perspective
In the first week of December last year the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies held a five-day residential course on Buddhist Psychology. The intention of the course was to introduce students to the classical models of mind and mental processing contained in the primary texts of the Pali Canon and other Buddhist texts, and then to review this material from the contemporary perspectives of modern psychology. The program was co-sponsored by the Cambridge Institute of Meditation and … [Read more...]
Upon the Tip of a Needle (Mahā Niddesa 1.42)
This remarkable and powerful poem, found buried amid the rather dry linguistic commentary of the Niddesa (a canonical commentary on the Aṭṭhakavagga of the Sutta Nipāta attributed to Sāriputta), speaks to the dual themes of impermanence and selflessness. In the later systematic psychology called Abhidhamma, these themes are developed into the doctrine of momentariness and the thorough enumeration of impersonal phenomena. All human experience is ever-changing, but is … [Read more...]
Leaving No Trace
This article is one of a series of occasional submissions by long-term practitioners at Cambridge Insight Meditation Center. The purpose of this series is to highlight the on-going practice sessions at CIMC and how these sessions are bringing new understanding and clarification to those enrolled in those sessions. These submissions have been approved by the guiding teachers at CIMC. A member of our ongoing “Old Yogis” practice group at Cambridge Insight Meditation Center (CIMC) recently told … [Read more...]
Meditation and the Therapist
Paul Fullon Ed.D. is Director of Mental Health Programs for Tufts Health Plan, an Instructor of Psychology in the Dept, of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and is the president of the Boston-based Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy. These comments are excerpted from a talk given at the bi-annual meditation retreat for psychologists and psychotherapists at BCBS in July 2003. When we look closely at some of the empirical studies conducted on the effectiveness of psychotherapy, … [Read more...]
Whose Life Is This, Anyway?
I don’t know many people in this country who really believe in rebirth—do you? I often meet Buddhists of various sorts, and yet it seems that most, like myself, have inherited from their cultural upbringing the “one life to live” model of the human condition. It makes me wonder how much of Buddhism we are really capable of absorbing. When we see how much of who we are now is embedded in our habitual responses to specific conditions in a world we each create from our unique illusions, what … [Read more...]
Lessons from an Illness
Marilyn Judson has studied vipassanā meditation with Shinzen Young for the past nine years, and with Thich Nhat Hanh for five years before that. She has a daily sitting meditation practice, meets weekly with her sangha for dharma and discussion and sitting practice, and attends several vipassanā retreats each year. I was lying in my hospital room and starting to feel desperate and afraid. I had a suction tube down my throat, an I.V. in my arm, and I hadn’t eaten in three days. Twenty-four … [Read more...]