Monday 29 June 2015

This week @ Beaches - Victor with us again

Hi all.

This week at Beaches Sangha we have Victor von der Heyde with us again. He'll be giving a talk called 'Honouring Our Empty Selves'. 'Emptiness' is a term that often gets used in Buddhist circles, especially in Zen, and it can be great to have some help getting your head around it. Again, I'm sorry to be missing this one, so I'll be asking you all about it when I get back next week.

I hope you can make it as this will be the last time we'll see Victor at least for a few months.

Enjoy!
LL

Tuesday 23 June 2015

This week @ Beaches Sangha....& please ignore any posts from the last couple of days

Hi all, from sunny Cairns.

This week at Beaches Sangha we have our very last sutta study with Winton Higgins. We are doing the final chapter of Satipatthana Sutta. I'm very sorry to be missing it :( This will be Winton's last regular showing at Beaches, so please thank him abundantly for his time with us. He's promised to visit in future on request.

Also I've had a couple of reports of old Sangha posts being emailed out to people over the last couple of days. I'm not sure what's going on there. If you've received any updates, just check the dates on them to see if they are old. I haven't sent anything since last week. So if you did get a dodgy update, please just ignore it.

LL


Monday 15 June 2015

This week @ Beaches Sangha - Victor von der Heyde part ii

Hi all.

This week @ Beaches we have Victor with us again. This time he's stimulating our minds with a talk called: 

Ethics as a Part of Practice: Engaged or Marginalised?

It was a great discussion last week (and the room was nice and warm). I hope you'll come along and join in.

Lenorë

Monday 8 June 2015

This week @ Beaches Sangha - Awakening & Transcendence



Hi all.

This week I'm pleased to announce the return of our semi-regular teacher, well, more like spasmodic teacher really :), Victor von der Heyde. Victor lives between Brisbane and Sydney, so we get patches of him each year.

Victor will be giving a talk called 'Awakening & Transcendence: Views and the Impact of Views'. His talks are always thought provoking and engaging and enjoyable. 

I hope to see you there on Thursday night.

LL

Tuesday 2 June 2015

This week @ Sangha - the importance of intentions

Hi all. 

Earlier in the year I mentioned I'd be giving a series of talks throughout 2015 on the eightfold path. This path is Gotama's (the Buddha's) list of important elements in life we need to attend to in order to live the path.It's also the fourth of the Four Great Tasks. The eight folds are:

View
Intention
Action
Speech
Livelihood
Effort
Mindfulness
Mental Integration

I've already given a talk on View and in fact the chapter we covered with Winton last week on the Four Noble Truths (or Four Great Tasks) pretty much covers that one. The 'view' appropriate to the path is to truly see and understand that much of our angst and unpleasantness is caused by our unwillingness to embrace dukkha and let go of craving for things to be different. The view also covers concepts like the truth of impermanence, the fact that we are not a fixed, stable, independent identity, and the fact that life does in fact entail some unpleasantness - see it, accept it, expect it!

Part of this view is also the realisation that when craving does in fact cease, peace and joy and friendliness and energy among other rather bonza phenomena, are what's left.

So this week's talk is on the second fold of the path: intention. This one's a cracker as it runs through all of our behaviour in life. Every bit of it! I hope you'll come along and join in the discussion.

LL