Charlotte Center For Mindfulness // Podcasts

This meditation explores the interplay between goodwill, compassion, letting go and welcoming the moment just as it is.

Let go a little, get a little peace. Let go a lot, get a lot of peace. Let go completely, get complete peace.   A. Chah Sounds good, but how do we really let go?

A beautiful old story from the Brothers Grimm called the Water of Life offers a powerful metaphor for life and practice.

Clouds In Each Paper, by Thich Nhat Hanh If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter” with the verb “to be”, we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud, we cannot have paper, so we can say that the cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are. If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist. — Published at www.awakin.org on Mar 25, 2002

This week’s podcast is a re-visit of the Story of the Buddha from 2021 in which we explore the myth story of the Buddha’s life and how it relates directly to understanding our own personal causes of suffering and the path to our healing.

This meditation is opening to a beautiful place that exists right in the heart of any moment– just as it is, easy, challenging and everything in-between.      

What happens when we feel like we are being told that we “should” be compassionate even towards people we find the most challenging– whether someone in our personal life or in the world? If we misunderstand compassion as excusing harmful behavior, of course our “innards” will rebel! When we instead begin to feel into the fierce openheartedness of strong courageous compassion, we start to see how much more effective we become in responding wisely to harmful behavior.

In this meditation we explore what happens right at that moment when we wake up from the mind drifting and the rich potency of this moment for teaching us about refuge, release, relief and letting go. BIRD WINGS Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror up to where you are bravely working. Expecting the worst, you look, and instead, here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see. Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as bird wings. -Rumi From The Essential Rumi Trans. Coleman Barks with John Moyne

This is a second sharing on the importance of bringing a light playful attitude into our heart/mindfulness practice.  As one researcher points out:   “Play lies at the core of creativity and innovation and allows us to be free of the constraints of time and to experience a diminished consciousness of self. It allows us to explore new ways of thinking and behaving so that we are not locked into a rigid way of doing things, are open to variation, see things in a different way, and gain new insights. Play allows us to break down barriers that separate us from others and fosters connection with others.”   Thanks to Still Water Mindfulness Practice Center for a beautiful article on play and mindfulness: https://www.stillwatermpc.org/dharma-topics/the-power-of-play/ Part one of sharing: Here  

This is a practice of releasing into a silence that is our way to a wholeness, healing and freedom that is our home.

In this sharing, we explore a practice suggested by the poet and writer Colette Lafia regarding the importance of play. As she names, play has particularly qualities that we can forget or get pushed aside as we age, qualities that are very important for deepening our relationship with all.

This meditation explores opening and relaxing into a beautiful space that awareness is always offering.

This sharing is based on a great story regarding a thief and his encounter with a Buddhist master.

Mindfulness has this beautiful potential of bringing our body, mind and heart together in harmony with whatever is here right now.

It is so important for us to know our country’s history and celebrate the movements we have made in the direction of healing and wholeness. It is also so important to know where there is still so much more work to do and make a commitment as best as we are able to name the need for this work. Note:  one correction– more than one third of the 8 Fold Path involves ethical principles.  Wise Speech, Wise Livelihood and Wise Action are the three ethical or Sila factors of the 8 Fold Path.

In this meditation, we explore letting go into a connectivity with the Earth which gives rooting and uplift both.

This sharing examines the useful similarities of learning to train and dog and a human mind both– all about mindfulness and mammal biology.

This meditation explores the 3 beautiful steps offered by Sayadaw U Tejaniya for all of moments of practice, and therefore, life.

This week’s sharing is based on a short story with the teaching, “Thank you, I am grateful for everything.” What are ways of relating to this teaching that are useful for you? What are ways that are not useful for you?

Finding an attunement to a moment of practice– no matter what we are feeling in our internal world– that is useful for our freedom and “thank you” begins to naturally arise.

Continuing with exploring the teachings of Sayadaw U Tejaniya, this week we look more deeply into the soft, gentle awareness that he teaches through the metaphor of tuning a musical instrument as well as the similarity I’m finding with training our new puppy.

This meditation explores energetically “attuning” to a soft relaxed awareness that can be with our conditions as we are as best as we are able. What a relief when we find this attunement!

Drawing from the same story as today’s meditation, we explore skillful investigation of the mind through a teaching from Sayadaw U Tejaniya.

This meditation starts with a beautiful short story about a Samurai and a Monk in which the Monk teaches on what makes heaven and what makes hell. How might the metaphor of the story be useful for your own practice in this moment now?

Paradigm shifts are when we come to understand that what we took as a reality is, in fact, not the deeper truth of things and it startles our systems enough into seeing the ourselves, each other or the the world through a whole new lens. Feeling into paradigm shifts helps shed light on the basic shift we are uncovering with our mindfulness practice.

In this meditation we explore the different feel of being caught in the reactive mind and those moments, no matter how small, when the body, mind and heart are in attunement. This attunement is what we are pointing to as “mindfulness,” and when we are aware of it, it has a natural sense of coming home. Again.     Please note: the mild echo is only in this podcast and has been fixed.

This sharing explores teachings from the book, Difficult Conversations.  This book examines the ways conversations we care about can so easily get “hijacked,” and ways to help us stay grounded in having the conversation we want to have instead.

The is a meditation on bringing care to our internal “bad student”– i.e. meeting the part of us we want to get rid of, the part we see as disrupting our meditation. This willingness to meet our troublesome, annoying, distracted, angry, worried, tired, or any other version of the “bad student” is ultimately the path of our freedom.

This is a practice of grounding in the physicality of here and now in a way that naturally allows a connecting with our experience in alignment with our deepest values.  This basic practice of the Arriving Sequence comes from Phillip Moffit. It is a beautiful practice, useful not only in formal meditation but also as a means of re-grounding in all of life.

We explore three necessary steps for a healing, empowering acceptance that more deeply engages us with meeting life as it is.

How does welcoming things as they are– not as we want them to be, but as they actually are in this moment now– open to healing? This meditation is a chance to explore working with a radical, freeing “welcoming” of our own selves as a first step.

Acceptance is a mind/heart quality that is so easily misunderstood… What is the difference between a reactive (i.e. fight/flight/freeze) misunderstanding this quality and an empowering opening to life? How might engaging with “acceptance” actually release some old story that holds us back and thereby free us for a transformative new understanding of life and how we might most powerfully engage?

We use the Arriving Sequence (Arriving, Being Available, Aligning) to ground ourselves in order to open to an exploration– what does it mean somatically, emotionally with curiosity to be accepting in this moment now?

Contemplating our “elemental” nature is a powerful way of breaking apart a sense of a separate self and understanding how fundamentally we are part of a flow of all things.

This meditation again explores the “Arriving Sequence” from Phillip Moffit and Dharma Ground. These 3 steps of 1) arriving, 2) being available and 3) aligning with our values and what inspires us is such a useful practice for formal meditation and for life in general.

In this version of a loving-kindness practice, we pay particular attention to how we meet our moments of distraction.

Night time worries, sleeplessness and morning “dread” are all prevalent as we deal anxiety in our changing world.  In this sharing, we will explore a neuroscience based understanding of why this is so common and how mindfulness practice offers a clear antidote. Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground. — Rumi

One useful way to settle into a practice is to use the breath to attune or “resonate” compassionately with whatever is present in the body/mind/heart.

This sharing invites a grounded reflection on the 2 basic fears of impermanence:  that we can’t hold on to what we want and that what we don’t want will last forever. Through a meditative inquiry, we explore how insight into the naturalness and ever moving flow of change offers a path of release for working with these fears.

A mountain meditation is a beautiful opportunity to explore a sense of a calm abiding mountain strength unmoved by the the endless natural changes of passing seasons, years and eons of time.  It helps teach us about tapping into that kind of mountain calm abiding strength for flowing with the endless natural changes of our own lives.

Wise understanding of the true nature of impermanence is akin to learning to swim in the ocean’s ever changing waves.     *Please note: technical difficulties throughout this podcast. We are working on it.*

We tend to think of ourselves as solid separate entities but just a bit of investigation into our true nature we find we are part – physically, not metaphorically – of a flow of changing elements related to everything else around.

Last week we looked at Bhikkhu Analayo’s understanding of sati or mindfulness as a good friend always available to us.  This week, we come back to this with a personal reflection or contemplation practice for examining– what do I do when seeking to be “mindful?” Right away from the moment of waking up in the morning our good friend sati can already be there, as if waiting for us. She is ready to accompany us throughout the rest of the day, encouraging us to stay receptive and soft, and open, soft and understanding. She never gets upset when we happen to forget about her. As soon as we remember her, she is right there to be with us again.   -Bhikkhu Analayo, Satipatthana Meditation

Being aware of the physical elements of Earth, Air, Sun and Water in the body can be an opening to seeing into a more intimate relationship with ourselves and all around us that is naturally wise and compassionate.

This sharing draws from teachings of Andrew Olendzki’s lovely short article, What’s In A Word, Sati, from Tricycle and Bhikku Analayo’s book, Satipatthana Meditation, both of which make clear that our usual understanding of the word mindfulness is inadequate for opening the true radical transformative potential inherent in the opening of a “mindful” mind. (Please excuse my misnaming of Bhikku Analayo as Ajahn Analayo in the talk. thanks!)

Drawing from a teaching from Bhikku Analayo, respected Buddhist scholar and monk, on a feminine nature of mindfulness, this meditation is an opportunity to explore mindfulness as an open, understanding receptivity to whatever arises: Right away from the moment of waking up in the morning our good friend sati can already be there, as if waiting for us. She is ready to accompany us throughout the rest of the day, encouraging us to stay receptive and soft, and open, soft and understanding. She never gets upset when we happen to forget about her. As soon as we remember her, she is right there to be with us again.    – Bhikku Analayo, Satipatthana Meditation (Please excuse my misnaming in the meditation of “Ajahn Analayo” instead of “Bhikku Analayo.”)

Drawing from the poem, What It Is, this meditation explores noticing the judgmental mind and its story, as well as the possibility of settling back into a radical wise accepting love. “It is nonsense says reason It is what it is says love It is calamity says calculation It is nothing but pain says fear It is hopeless says insight It is what it is says love It is ludicrous says pride It is foolish says caution It is impossible says experience It is what it is says love” -Erich Fried

“..To every grain that enters: ‘Welcome.’ To every parting mote: ‘Be blessed.'” From: Earthworms, poem by Lynn Ungar, www.lynnungar.com Please note: no accompanying talk.

Classical Zen Story shared by Tara Brach in Radical Acceptance: An old woman had supported a monk for twenty years, letting him live in a hut on her land. After all this time she figured the monk, now a man in the prime of life, must have attained some degree of enlightenment. So she decided to test him. Rather than taking his daily meal to him herself, she asked a beautiful young girl to deliver it. She instructed the girl to embrace the monk warmly—and then to report back to her how he responded. When the girl returned, she said that the monk had simply stood stock still, as if frozen. The old woman then headed for the monk’s hut. What was it like, she asked him, when he felt the girl’s warm body against his? With some bitterness he answered, “Like a withering tree, a rock in winter, utterly without warmth.” Furious, the old woman threw him out and burned down his hut, exclaiming, “How could I have wasted all these years on such a fraud.” How does this story land for you?  What is to be learned from that old woman that’s relevant to you in your life?   Please note: some audio distortion throughout podcast. Apologies.

What happens when we totally let go of an evaluation of our meditation as a “success or failure,” or it “working” for me or not “working” for me?  In opening to the dance of energy in this human life, we can’t help but learn a wise compassion to what it means to be human and a spacious awareness that can hold it all.