Campus Sangha Schedule

The UM Campus Sangha, a non-affiliated Buddhist meditation and discussion group, will be resuming weekly meetings and meditation at the Center for Ethics, 1000 E. Beckwith Ave. Gatherings will be Tuesday nights and begin at 7pm with a dharma talk and meditation beginning promptly at 7:15pm with discussion to follow.

This summer we will be focusing on metta, the Buddhist practice of loving-kindness. The schedule (with fuller details below) will be as follows:

6-17: phases of the practice, understanding why the practice proceeds as it does and how to work with difficult parts for each of us.

6-24: visualizations, using the imagination to deepen your experience of loving-kindness.

7-1: causes and conditions, understanding the basis for our negative emotions to overcome them, and how our practice will set the foundation for positive feelings.

7-8: taking care of yourself, the first stage of metta bhavana focuses on cultivating loving-kindness toward yourself. See why taking care of yourself is a central Buddhist practice.

7-15: practicing joy, we will focus on bringing joy into your meditation and meditation (awareness) into your joy.

7-22: gratitude, turning the mind to what we are grateful for in this world of flux helps to keep us on track through difficult times in life. Here we will discuss practices of gratitude.

7-29: metta and mindfulness, we will explore the interplay of these two foundations of Buddhist meditation.

8-5: clinging and labels, it is typical for us to try hard to control things (and people) in life by clinging to ideas of them and placing labels on them. This, however brings us suffering when things and people naturally behave outside those labels and ideas. We’ll explore our relationships with clinging and labels, how they may be useful, and how they may bring us suffering.

8-12: the conceit I-am, this central Buddhist teaching asks us to look closely at who/what we think we are, we will dig into the labels (again) we have heaped upon ourselves that often bring us out of tune with reality.

8-19: the Karaniya Metta Sutta, reading the text as a source of inspiration and contemplation.

(6/17) This week we will look at particular phases of the practice. Some people have difficulty with the first phase, cultivating loving-kindness to yourself, but most common is the fourth phase, dealing with the ‘difficult’ person. We’ll explore strategies for the real difficulties faced in this practice. Some people have had to reverse orders a bit, starting with a good friend, which then opens their heart to shift to themselves. Others will find that they need to leave the most difficult people in their lives out of their meditation for a while so as to avoid getting caught up in old cycles of hurtful emotion.

(6/24) Next week we will discuss visualizations, engaging the imagination to deepen the emotional impact of the practice. Visualizations include imagining a lotus or rose at one’s heart with a diamond in it, representing our innate purity, and allowing light and warmth to grow from that pure center as we cultivate loving-kindness for ourselves. We then imagine our good friend (and then others) joining us, and our own light and warmth embracing them, bringing out the same pure qualities that in turn embrace the meditator in a reciprocal flow of metta. How much do these help? How might they become a distraction? We’ll see.

(note, there will be a Puja, a devotional ceremony, held at the Rocky Mountain Buddhist Center on Wednesday, June 25, at 7pm that I will attend and encourage others to attend as well)

(7/1) After that we will look at the theme of causes and conditions, central to Buddhist psychology. We see that our own pain and trauma is based on causes and conditions, allowing blame and self-labeling to dissipate. We also see that the the joy brought to us by friends is based on causes and conditions, allowing us to not cling to it. Likewise with our ‘difficult’ person, we see that he or she has caused us pain based on his/her own causes and conditions, bringing forth forgiveness and reconciliation, crucial steps in developing an open heart toward those who have harmed us. We can then work to set new causes and conditions, ones of acceptance and open-heartedness, to bring more goodness and joy to our lives.

(7/8) Another talk on this will look at the importance of taking care of oneself first. While this may seem selfish, it isn’t. As I put it in a comment last winter:

… when I am dealing so much with my own issues, I am pretty worthless to those around me who need a hand. That’s not to say I shouldn’t deal with my issues, but that hopefully I do overcome them, and quickly. So my sphere of suffering is very small, it really only deals with this particular living being.

When I am in better shape I can more easily reach out and share in and help with the suffering of those I love, and then to neutral people, and then to enemies (starting to sound like a metta bhavana meditation), and so on. We loosen the grasp of (individualized) selfishness and come to see (experientially) interconnectedness and maybe even get some glimpse of whatever the heck dhamma is.

So it is vital that we take care of ourselves, and also vital that we cultivate relationships with good people who can/will help us out when we are struggling. Honest relationships, time in nature, extended meditation, and so on all break us out of solipsism and its rounds of suffering.

More soon…. may all beings be well, happy, and free from suffering.