Hi all.
This week @ Beaches Sangha we have a special guest, Jill Shepherd. Jill lives something of the mendicant's life - she has no fixed home, no car etc.....to some extent she's a 'wanderer' like the Buddha was. She's currently staying in the Blue Mountains and will be making her way down here (on public transport) to be with us. If there's any way you can join us this week to help welcome and support her visit to us, that would be wonderful (there are a few regulars who will be away, so I'm really hoping as many of you can come as possible).
Jill's talk will be centred on helping us maintain momentum with our practice:
Practice
in Daily Life: the Ten Parami as means to maintaining momentum
Many
people struggle to maintain a regular meditation practice in the midst of daily
life, and can get discouraged when their formal sitting doesn't measure up to
the calm and clarity experienced on retreat. The ten parami are a list of
qualities that require the rough and tumble of daily life to develop
though, so assessing our practice in terms of these qualities can be a more
encouraging way of measuring progress.
Jill's background
Jill began practicing insight meditation in Thailand in 1999, and since that time has lived and worked at several meditation centres and monasteries in the US, Australia, England, and Thailand. She recently spent seven years on staff at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre, Massachusetts, where she participated in several long retreats and Buddhist study programmes, as well as offering weekly meditation classes at a nearby men's prison. She is a graduate of the IMS / Spirit Rock teacher training program in the US, under the guidance of Joseph Goldstein and Gil Fronsdal. Currently, she divides her time between the USA, Australia and New Zealand, teaching vipassana and brahma vihara retreats and offering ongoing study and practice groups focused on bringing the dharma into daily life.