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Teacher: Rodney Smith
Date: 2013-07-30
Venue: Seattle Insight Meditation Center
Series
- Dependent Origination 2013-01-22
Description
This week we will look at feelings from their effect on the body. Each feeling tone has a body posture and pose that reveals its occurrence. As pleasant feelings emerge and shape themselves into a psychic force, the body starts literally leaning into the experience with expectations. This can be noticed as a hurried pace, and a forward leaning tilt. Aversion is just the opposite. The avoidance occurs as a kind of backpedaling, a leaning away and tilting back in contraction or a sudden change in direction. Delusion is harder to pin down but is spacey, airy, and glazed over, often only tangentially connected to the earth. Delusion has lost the ground of its experience and because of that is usually more difficult to notice physically. There is of course the vertical stance that is upright and open to whatever comes that the homework is meant to address.
Homework
Practice the vertical stance of receiving, listening, and learning. Use phrases such as “surrender to this,” “just stop and learn,” “no pursuit or avoidance”, or “stand vertically.” What fears arise when you move into this stance? Does it feel like a loss of control and influence? Does this stance make sense from the spiritual perspective of “wise view?” When our life is based in feelings, we are dedicated to pursuing pleasure, but not connection with life. Why is this so? What occurs when you receive the world that does not happen when you push forward or lean backward in time? Practice the art of listening from this posture of receiving. Receive the other person, not only the person’s words.
Video
Link to view on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/71625119
TalkID=151 SeriesID=47
