Monday 27 February 2017

Family Retreat with Betsy Faen, Gorrick's Run [23-25 September 2017]

Main Content Inline Small
This is a camping retreat, with everyone sharing the cooking and the responsibility for activities for the children.
This retreat will provide time for shared activities with the children, like bushwalks, but also time for parents who want to, to be able to meditate while their children are having fun doing other activities.
Betsy Faen will provide some meditation instruction for those that would like it, plus the possibility of individual interviews and groups.
There is one shared room available for sleeping in, plus wide verandahs for those who don't want to sleep in tents. Gorrick's Run has bush toilets and showers, a beautiful meditation hall, and a cottage with a kitchen and dining room. It is in a beautiful bush setting near St. Alban's.
Please contact Betsy: 9913 2979, 0403 871 605, or betsyfaen@gmail.com if you are interested.

Monday 20 February 2017

This week @ Beaches - Jampa and the Eight Worldly Winds



Hi everyone.

This week @ Beaches Sangha, Jampa is giving a talk on the Eight Worldly Winds. From memory they are:

Pleasure and pain
Loss and gain
Obscurity and fame
...............................

You'll have to come along to hear what the last two are, because I can't remember and I want to remember rather than Google it!

These are things that come and go, that buffet us around in our lives like the wind. I've been wanting to hear a talk on them for a long time, so I'm really looking forward to it.

Hope to see you there.
LL

Monday 13 February 2017

This week @ Beaches Sangha: The Circle of Compassion


We talk a lot about compassion - the willingness to feel with another and to care or feel good will. In this session we're going to explore our own personal boundaries of compassion. What are the conditions for compassion? Who is in, and who is outside our circles? And what does that tell us about the landscape of our own inner world?

Here's another, quite relevant, quote for the week from Rainer Maria Rilke:

"So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you."

Monday 6 February 2017

This week @ Beaches Sangha



Hi all.

This week @ Beaches, Sylvie is leading us again. This time our topic is generosity. This is one of my favourite topics. It's a really powerful part of practice; indeed Gotama said that if we knew what he knew about generosity, we wouldn't let a day go by without practising it. It's also a part of practice that can be easily hijacked by 'shoulds', the desire to please or gain approval from others, or to look benevolent. Intention is important.

Come and explore it with us on Thursday.

Here's another Rilke quote for the week:

"I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

LL