How often do you reflect on having fun and playing as an adult? What do fun and play look like in your life? Does it result in joy? These are the questions Chaplain Kyle Sorys poses to the audience in this week’s talk. After a fifteen-minute meditation, Kyle starts by sharing his past struggles with meditation and his current exploration of including fun, play, and joy into daily mindfulness practice, primarily in the form of “Photography Meditation.” This leads to a short teaching on the cultivation of bare awareness — being aware of the essence of sense experience without adding anything extra. According to Kyle, it all comes down to creating the cause and conditions right now, in this moment, that brings about our future happiness and well-being. And for him, it is vital to incorporate fun and play.  

If you feel inspired by these teachings, and wish to practice generosity, please consider supporting MOI and its teachers by visiting, https://mindfulnessoutreachinitiative.org/generosity/

How has your practice resulted in a greater sense of patience and an ability to be patient? As MOI teacher Johnathan Woodside states in this talk, just by returning again and again to the present moment, we are cultivating patience. Patience involves having a nonjudgmental and non-preferential willingness to engage with what is present. It also includes developing disenchantment, stilling, and direct knowledge of experience. Johnathan adds that patience helps the mind see clearly, especially the illusion that getting what we want leads to lasting happiness. Instead, we realize that everything is constantly changing and is ultimately unsatisfactory. In addition to patience, Johnathan also stresses the practice of non-doing, of just being aware of our experiences and meeting it all with mindfulness. We no longer are out to manage or control our experiences. There is no longer anything to gain or anyone to become. We merely sit and observe what is taking place to gain insight. As Johnathan says, “We don’t have to make anything happen. We just have to be witness to what is happening without delusion.”

If you feel inspired by these teachings, and wish to practice generosity, please consider supporting MOI and its teachers by visiting, https://mindfulnessoutreachinitiative.org/generosity/

In this week’s talk, MOI teacher Mark Wiesman leads us in a guided meditation through the Four Divine Abodes: loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity. Mark tells us that we can go to these four places anytime we need. They are tools that can help us cultivate more openness and expansiveness in our hearts and minds, which by nature leads to more calm and peace in our lives.  

If you feel inspired by these teachings, and wish to practice generosity, please consider supporting MOI and its teachers by visiting, https://mindfulnessoutreachinitiative.org/generosity/