Episode

Teacher: Rodney Smith

Date: 2002-06-10

Venue: Seattle Insight Meditation Center

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Homework Notice how thinking keeps you from being sensitive to your inward and outward experience. Go outdoors and take a walk. As you move around open the senses to the sights, sounds, and smells of the environment. Notice how the day’s events impact the listening. Watch how “the story of the me” forms around this sense data (my flowers look so good this time of year, I wonder if this runny nose is the beginning of a cold or just allergies, the sound of that airplane reminds me of our vacation in July). Now practice presence and release yourself from the thinking. Notice what difference that makes to your availability and sensitivity. From this exercise what does being sensitive mean?

TalkID=768 SeriesID=19

Teacher: Rodney Smith

Date: 2002-05-27

Venue: Seattle Insight Meditation Center

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Homework Notice how much time you spend with sexually related thoughts. How much of your energy is consumed in that direction and how many of your interactions have a sexual overtone? How far do you go in playing out the fantasies? When does your sexual energy interfere with your commitments of heart? Do you use your sexual energy to gain power or manipulate the situation in any way? Is your sexual life in order?
This week bring a concerted effort to watching the forms and displays of your sexual energy. Notice the positive and negative effects of the energy. During sexual activity are you consumed with greed and desire or is there an affectionate sensitivity to the whole person? What role does intimacy play in your sexual activities?

TalkID=694 SeriesID=29

Teacher: Rodney Smith

Date: 2002-05-13

Venue: Seattle Insight Meditation Center

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Homework This precept is about the tension between replenishing and reducing. There are many opportunities each day to strengthen generosity or selfishness. Living with the gross and subtle forms of this precept will show you the conflict between wise and unwise view. Use the following mantra this week: “Where is generosity in this moment?” This question points towards the conflict between your self-interest and interconnectedness. Open to the contraction of heart and the lack of tolerance. Watch the subtle infractions of this precept, how you take disproportionately of time, space, and objects. Notice when you “take” advantage of someone. The most subtle form of this precept implies “taking just what is given” in the moment and not adding anything to it. Suspend your thoughts, conclusions, opinions, and views. Receive the moment just as it is.

TalkID=693 SeriesID=29

Teacher: Rodney Smith

Date: 2002-04-29

Venue: Seattle Insight Meditation Center

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Homework The precept to refrain from taking life is concerned with developing sensitivity to all forms and expressions of life. Where do you lose that sensitivity? Although no being is dismissed as irrelevant, “refraining from” is not the same as “thou shall not.” What is the difference? Is it possible to live and never kill other life forms? This week build in the pause of “refrain from” and use the space to connect with life rather than eliminating it. The gross infractions are more obvious but the subtle components of this precept might include any dismissive or negating behavior of another. What are the effects on this precept when you only consider your own needs? How is the hurt from your dismissive actions rationalized (“She deserved it anyway….”)?

TalkID=658 SeriesID=29

Teacher: Rodney Smith

Date: 2002-04-15

Venue: Seattle Insight Meditation Center

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TalkID=648 SeriesID=29

Teacher: Rodney Smith

Date: 2002-03-18

Venue: Seattle Insight Meditation Center

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Homework Finding spiritual sufficiency in the midst of the wanting mind is the purpose of the homework this week. Notice how unfulfilled desires can lead to a loss of vitality and boredom. If thoughts go unchecked, desire occasionally moves even deeper into neediness and dependency. Notice where the wanting mind is directed and what it seems to lack. What experience is needed for fulfillment? Feel the sense of incompletion within the wanting. What self-descriptive thoughts perpetuate the assumption of being incomplete without the desired object? Feel the dependency on the object of your desire. Can you relax with the wanting without trying to fulfill it? Behind the wanting is the fear of not having. Embody that fear and see what it says about you.
When you find yourself pursuing a desire, stop the action and ask, “Why am I doing this?” Cut through all the excuses and rationalization until you arrive at “I don’t know.” When you have stopped, the emotion driving the action will be felt. Enter into the emotion and be the feeling. Become intimately familiar with all aspects of the emotion. Remain aware of all the thoughts that arise within the emotion. As you become more familiar with the desire, the power it has over you decreases.

TalkID=709 SeriesID=28

Teacher: Rodney Smith

Date: 2002-03-11

Venue: Seattle Insight Meditation Center

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Homework Observe how loneliness fosters the view of being disconnected. Loneliness has a compelling thought stream that reaffirms how cut off and tragic you are. There is often the accompanying pain from the belief in one’s insufficiency that says you are not worthy of connection. Are you able to see how self-mistrust helps engender the feelings of disconnection and loneliness? The mind identifies with the pain of being cut off and confirms its premise through external observation. The mind sees according to the emotion it is struggling against, not according to objective reality. To arrest this process, track the source back to the pain of feeling disconnected.
Let thoughts of your lack of self-worth go. Relax with the emotion, as painful as it might be. Bring caring attention (connection) to the emotion and then expand it to your whole being. Finally, soften your eyes and allow everything to be just as it is. Ask yourself, “Where am I disconnected in this moment?”

TalkID=711 SeriesID=28

Teacher: Rodney Smith

Date: 2002-02-25

Venue: Seattle Insight Meditation Center

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Homework Notice whether you define yourself more by what you do not do then by what you do. “I wasn’t able to have a child…I wasn’t able to be an artist.” That is, are you continually lamenting your missed relationships, careers, and opportunities, or do you appreciate the life you are living for itself? Aliveness is constrained by regret. Regret keeps it focused on what could have been instead of what is. It needs your appreciation of the here and now in order to fully express itself. Watch any tendency to downgrade your immediate experience as secondary because it is not how you wanted it to be.
Notice how you relate to your troubling moods. Do you feel they need resolution? Do your moods insinuate something about you that need further work and exploration? Do you think by exploring them further you can reach a conclusion about who you are? Is this investigation based on a subtle attempt to avoid the emotion? Watch any attempt this week to form a conclusion about yourself through your emotions. Hold yourself to the task at hand, which is to feel them completely without conclusions.

TalkID=708 SeriesID=28

Teacher: Rodney Smith

Date: 2002-02-11

Venue: Seattle Insight Meditation Center

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Homework It is important to catch complaining in its tracks and not allow this state of mind to feed off other people’s negativity or indulge in your thoughts. When you find yourself complaining, ask yourself these questions:
Do I want to die with a complaining mind, and if not, what must I do now to assure the ending of this character pattern?
What am I feeling right now?
Am I able to hold these emotions or do they seek further justification in outside events?
Am I perpetuating these emotions with self-pitying thoughts?
Am I seeking others to confirm my aversive world?

TalkID=706 SeriesID=28

Teacher: Rodney Smith

Date: 2002-01-28

Venue: Seattle Insight Meditation Center

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Homework Reflect on your childhood. What judgements were upheld in your family? What were the prejudices around money, class, race, gender, intelligence, etc.? How did these judgements condition your upbringing? How did they condition your view of your world? Are they still operating within your current view? You can usually discover some residue of judgement within your views, opinions, pride, and values.
How were you treated when you were young? What was communicated to you about who you were and what you did? Did you internalize these evaluations? What self-judgements persist from that time? What is your relationship to these inward voices? Are you feeding the judging mind by judging the judger? Notice your inward judgement and outward judgement this week. When you find yourself judging, go directly to the pain of inadequacy behind the judgement. Judgement is an attempt to ease this pain and for a moment there may be some relief. Pain forces judgement to keep judging and will persist until you open to it. Stop the cycle by acknowledging the hurt.
Judgement is seeing the world in the quantifiable terms of having and not having. Is there another way to see? Is there another view that is not based on a summation? How will you access this view?.

TalkID=704 SeriesID=28