Seattle Insight Meditation

Episode

The Need to Be Somebody

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

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The Story and the Storyteller

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

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Non-Doing

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

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Understanding Content

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

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Self-Kindness and Self-Indulgence

Teacher: Rodney Smith

Date: 2002-12-07

Venue: Seattle Insight Meditation Center

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Homework Study a few of your behaviors this week such as sleeping, eating, or recreational enjoyment such as listening to music or watching videos. How much of these activities arise from self-indulgence and how much from self-kindness? Are all forms of entertainment self-indulgent? Since almost any action can be either indulgent or kind, what determines which way you label it?

“When you consider yourself equally deserving (self-love) then the quality of your action is as important as the result.” Do you believe this is a true statement? What does self-love have to do with the way you do things? Isn’t it good enough that the results benefit others? Explore this question this week and watch whether you consider yourself equally deserving in your actions.

TalkID=763

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Sangha: A Path of Relationship

Teacher: Rodney Smith

Date: 2002-12-06

Venue: Seattle Insight Meditation Center

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Homework Questions for personal inquiry: Do you experience most interpersonal relationships as growth opportunities or troubling?

Do you make space in your life for others?

Do you frequently feel isolated and lonely? How much of the isolation comes from assumptions about self and other?

Do you make the effort to attend gatherings of like-minded people?

Reflection: What was your life like before you knew the existence of “”a Path””? What is different now? How does the sangha support that Path and your growth on it? Would the Path be the same without the sangha? What efforts do you make to build cohesion in the sangha?

Exercise: Become active in your support of like-minded people. Befriend someone from the sangha, volunteer for a community activity, join a like-minded group or become socially engaged in meaningful action. The sangha like the dharma takes each one of us to make it complete.

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