dharmapunx NYC

hear talk at http://dharmapunxnyc.podbean.com/2009/06/11/relationships/ how do i meet the right person? someone who loves, understands, accepts, supports us & shares my life? The question is, why aren't we providing these things for ourself? • In order to be understood, supported, accepted, we have to give all those things to ourselves. All the acceptance in the world is empty when we don't truly have acceptance for all of our experience. • We have to arrive in relationships from a place of wholeness, rather than being needy, lonely, desperate. Neediness is utterly unattractive. self-confidence and inner peace is very very attractive to others. • When we can give ourselves what we need, we have no need to control our partners. • As far as "sharing our life" why can't we share our experiences with our spiritual friends? Why do we need there to be a single person who knows everything? Why can't we give that to ourselves? The test: • close eyes and ask oursel

The idea of "a new year" is pretty much an abstraction, in that tomorrow very little in the world will drastically change. still, its a good time for reflection: • what actions have we taken in the last year? were they skillful actions? unskillful ones? • has what we've done allowed for more or less inner peace in our minds? • if life ended, would we have accomplished something worthwhile? the emphasis of these reflections are the things we do towards our inner peace and spiritual progress. • What's happened to us is beyond our control, spiritually unimportant. • as psychologists (maslow, carl rogers, eric fromm, seligman, etc) have noted, there's a direct correlation between the well-being and purposefulness we experience and our positive actions, especially those actions relating to positive actions that contribute to something larger than our self-centeredness (nature, organizations, spiritual practices) • our habits that cause stress we're not condemned to

the dhammapada opens with 1. Mind is the author of all things. All things are mind made. If a person speaks or acts with an unskillful mind suffering follows him like the cartwheel follows the ox. 2. Mind is the author of all things. All things are mind made. If a person speaks or acts with a skillful mind happiness follows him like his shadow. note: it is important to notice the verb follows here. follows implies a passage of time, either short or long. 3. Those who maintain thoughts like "That person abused me, hurt me, stole from me." do not still their hatred. 4. Those who do maintain thoughts like "That person abused me, hurt me, stole from me." Still their hatred. 5. Hatred is never eased and ended by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred eased and ended. This is an eternal law. All things are representations All the things we experience are recreations of the world in the mind. while there is an external, objective world, the buddha's teachi

Welcome to the blog. The guiding principal is to use this blog as an expediate to distribute the notes I prepare for my tuesday evening Dharmapunx New York talks. Hopefully these annotation s will aid in understanding the powerful spiritual tools attributed to the Buddha 2500 years ago in the Pali Canon. I generally spend 5 - 10 hours preparing for each talk's topic, combing through the Pali Canon (found at Ajahn Geoff's Accesstoinsight.org), talks by Theravadan Buddhist monks, books written by Theravadan monks in my library, along with reflecting on my own experience with each topic. As I do my research for each talk, I type out notes which I refer to while preparing for the presentation. Rarely, if ever, do I actually look at the notes while teaching, so the notes contain far more ideas than I actually cover in the talks. People who are interested in the topics—especially those who want additional material—might find these preparatory jottings worthwhile. If any of these note