Episode

Teacher: Rodney Smith

Date: 2003-02-17

Venue: Seattle Insight Meditation Center

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Homework Your story gives you a fix, a designation and location in time and place. It says, “I was here and did this at this time.” By designating yourself in memory you carry an ongoing sense of who you are derived from the past. This week you want to work with the feeling of a fixed and located sense of yourself.
Watch how fixing upon your story and the stories of those around you offers a sense of control through knowledge and predictability. They are a deliberate movement toward security and certainty. What is lost in this attempt to assign order to a universe that has no clear designation or purpose? What is gained? The problem is that once your mind becomes dependent upon fixation, it cannot release the fixation to change or die. The mind wants continuity. But is that realistic? This week when you fix upon something being just what you designate it to be, ask yourself, “Is this designation true? Will this last?” Be aware of the emotions behind the fixation.

TalkID=703 SeriesID=31

Teacher: Rodney Smith

Date: 2003-02-03

Venue: Seattle Insight Meditation Center

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Homework Offer yourself a thorough self-assessment. Is there personal pain that needs more attention and examination? What activities would help you better understand this area–therapy, service, exercise? Don’t sit by and claim to be nobody when you feel personal pain. Be willing to make inroads and deepen your understanding of the pain.
Ask yourself who you must become before you can find self-contentment. Be honest in this questioning. What qualities of character, skills, and talents would allow you to feel more complete? Would you like to be acknowledged and have more prominence? The answers to these questions will determine the conscious or unconscious direction of your life.
This week watch how self-discontentment drives your action. What is the emotion behind the discontentment? Are you feeling disadvantaged, insufficient, unworthy, or incomplete? What are the self-beliefs operating within that emotion? “I’m not there yet…, I need to be acknowledged…, I must grow in this area….” Discontentment propels the need to be somebody. Observe people who have achieved what you strive for and see if they demonstrate real freedom of heart.

TalkID=702 SeriesID=31

Teacher: Rodney Smith

Date: 2003-01-20

Venue: Seattle Insight Meditation Center

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Homework All week ask yourself who you are without your story. Notice how your story explains and interprets events, how it projects itself through judgment and prejudice, and how you depend upon it for recognition and definition. When you find yourself complaining or judging notice the themes of the script, and ask yourself, “Who am I without this story?” What emotions drive the story line? Experience yourself when the story is not active. Who are you in meditation? Who are you in deep sleep?

TalkID=700 SeriesID=31

Teacher: Rodney Smith

Date: 2003-01-18

Venue: Seattle Insight Meditation Center

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Homework Carry the statement, “Seek first to understand before being understood,” throughout this week. How does this intention create a listening attitude? Experience the effect of listening on your heart, how it opens you to caring. How does your behavior change when you allow actions to flow from listening instead of making assumptions prior to the action? Watch how the phrase interrupts reactive and impulsive thinking. Do you see the potential for changing many of your relationships through this intention?

TalkID=772

Teacher: Rodney Smith

Date: 2003-01-06

Venue: Seattle Insight Meditation Center

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Homework The story of “me” is an incomplete fable. “I will be fulfilled after I…” is the logic of the mind. The “me” exists because of desire. Fulfillment never arrives because desire is future oriented and overlooks the present. This week examine what is lacking in your life. Has acquisition ever ended in complete satisfaction? Turn toward the longing itself, the need to have or be more than you are now. Feel it in your body and how it plays into your mental scripts of dissatisfaction or inadequacy. Do not allow your story to justify the sense of incompleteness. Stop the future search in its tracks by saying, “Let contentment be found here and now in the middle of longing, not in its absence.”

TalkID=699 SeriesID=31

Teacher: Rodney Smith

Date: 2003-01-05

Venue: Seattle Insight Meditation Center

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Description The path of lay Buddhism.

TalkID=757