Marie will facilitate. She shares:
Last week we recited the Five Mindfulness Trainings and focussed on the Fifth Training from ARISE “Welcoming as Nourishment and Healing”. When I returned to this Training, the next day, I was struck by this line: “I will cultivate joy to support me toward individual and collective wholeness.”
With all that is going on in the world and in this country, I welcomed this guidance and was curious to learn more. In “The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching”, Thay writes “It is true that the Buddha taught the truth of suffering, but he also taught the truth of ‘dwelling happily in things as they are...’ Please ask yourself, “What nourishes joy in me? What nourishes joy in others? Do I nourish joy in myself and others enough?”
What a wonderful question! As I explored it, I realized that, for me, joy and inter-being inter-are. When I feel one, I feel the other, and these feelings ground me in ways that help to deepen my practice, my awareness and my actions.
On Monday, please come experience joy, share what brings you/others joy and explore its impact. After our first sit, you can learn to dance (or watch others dancing) to Jerusalema, a song from South Africa that has swept the world, bursting with exuberance and connecting people as they dance together. The Jerusalema “dance challenge” has become a global phenomenon, and you can learn more about that here.
The scope and depth of crises in South Africa were daunting long before Covid struck, and they are now much worse. The lyrics of Jerusalema are poignant:
"Look into my eyes
See pain and sacrifice,
Struggling to survive.
Do not leave me here!
My place is not here
My kingdom is not here!"
And, the music is irresistible! The evolution of this “dance challenge” illustrates how we can touch joy and embody connection in the midst of suffering.
After our second sit, we’ll have a Dharma sharing. In preparation, I invite you to do some pleasant homework: experiment with different ways of cultivating joy in your life and in the lives of others. Notice what happens when you do. How do you feel? To what extent do you feel better able to support individual and collective wholeness?
Finally, if you fancy something rather fun, you can try the Jerusalema dance on your own. Here is a tutorial to get you started!
I look forward to being together on Monday.
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The Fifth Mindfulness Training: Welcoming as Nourishment and Healing
Aware of the suffering caused by the consumption of an inadequate history of racial and ethnic forms of social segregation, I am committed to healing myself and the world by welcoming and practicing with this awareness.
I will notice how my thoughts, perceptions, feelings, words, and actions may have been influenced by this inaccurate history. I will look deeply to understand how both physical and mental health, for myself, my family, and my society have been influenced by embracing and denying this racial, social, and ethnic history of inferiority and superiority and its legacy of inequities and injustices.
I will cultivate joy to support me toward individual and collective wholeness. I will practice mindfulness of the Four Kinds of Nutriments to become aware of how edible foods, sense impressions, volition, and consciousness are all influenced by this history. Practicing with Right Energy and Right Resolve, my Right Action of consumption will include awareness of certain websites, electronic games, TV programs, films, magazines, books, and conversations and how they continue to foster wrong perceptions of racial, ethnic, and social injustices. My understanding of interbeing supports my conscious consumption that sustains a healthy understanding of differences, one that does not oppress or discriminate. This Right Insight will preserve peace, joy, and bring healing in my body and consciousness, and in the collective body and consciousness of my family, my society and the Earth. To assure that my descendants do not live in a racially, ethnically, and socially unjust world, I commit to diligently practicing with true welcoming on this path to nourish and heal myself, the sangha, and society.
(full breath)
This is the fifth of the Five Mindfulness Trainings. Have I made an effort to study and practice it during the past few weeks?