Todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;Taking Awareness Deeper,and#8221; by Paramabandhu, is from the comprehensive and invaluable talk titled and#8220;Mindfulness For Just About Everythingand#8221; given at the San Francisco Buddhist Center in 2006. Drawing on many years of experience as a consultant psychiatrist and Dharma teacher, he invites us to consider the lessons Buddhist techniques around meditation and mindfulness training can bring to the field of mental health and#8211; especially to problems with depression and addiction. The talk evokes the Buddha in the Satipatthana Sutta to explore the four traditional foundations of mindfulness and discuss their potential use in therapeutic contexts.
Dharmabytes from free buddhist audio
Taking Awareness Deeper
[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by free Buddhist audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. [music] So what I'm suggesting is there are four useful things to help with various health conditions, which is first of all, clocking what's going on. Learning to be with our experience is a difficult experience. Changing our perspective on what's going on and allowing wiser choice and choosing wisely dependent on that. So they're really useful skills, they can help with recurrent depression, with anxiety, with pain, with preventing relapse into addiction. But they can also be very useful for life in general, because all of us at times get anxious, feel depressed, avoid our experience when perhaps that's not the most helpful thing to do. And in a way it's an investigation of our experience, the way of being with our experience, it can just go deeper and deeper. It's said that after the Buddha gained enlightenment, that he continued practicing Satya Pitana, he continued deepening his understanding, and he enjoyed it. So that's why he did it. So for whatever reason, in a way where we can deepen our awareness, again returning to this refrain, noticing things arising, passing away, we can notice more and more just how things change. And so we're really getting our bones, this sense of impairments in ourselves and in other people that we can see more and more fully. And now, as I said, more and more fully, how we are in a flux, how we are a set of processes. And can even in a way just more and more enjoy that sense of play, of how things just arise and pass away. So that the more we can then do that, then in a way the less will actually hold tightly to our experience. And we then won't be so pulled around by it, we won't be so controlled by it, we won't be so fooled by it. We can see it for what it is. So sati sampajanya, mindfulness and clear knowledge, basically from a Buddhist perspective leads to just vision and knowledge of things as they are, in a way it's another way of saying the same thing. In other words, it eventually leads to freedom because, as I said, you're just not controlled by your experience in the same way. So, as the Buddhist said, this is the direct path for the purification of beings, for the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of pain and grief, for the attainment of the true way, for the realization of nibhana, namely the four foundations of mindfulness. In other words, in a way what you get from the Buddha is an invitation to take this path as far as we want, whether that's to surmount particular sorrows of recurring depression or anxiety, or to help overcome, help deal with physical pain, or whether it's to move towards complete awakening, until eventually one is abiding, independent and no longer clinging to anything in the world. Well, there's lots of place in this series, you get a bit of sense of that, but when I was writing this talk, it reminded me of sometimes the songs of realizations you get where people, when they gain enlightenment, they give these little verse, which just expresses their sense of freedom. So, I thought I'd just end with one of those. So, this is by Kottita, and his song of realization was this. Dead to the world and its troubles, he recites mantras, mind unruffled, shaking destructions away, like the wind God scatters a few forest leaves. We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donnie, and thank you. [music fades out] [music fades out] [music fades out] [BLANK_AUDIO]