Is the meditation bell still heard? Are the vibrations still felt by the body?

Pause.

Relax.

Open.

Trust Emergence.

Listen Deeply and Speak the Truth.

Reflect on the benefits that you gained from your retreat. What were these gifts? What was learned, reinforced, clarified, understood? Is there a felt sense in your body of these benefits? What is that sense?

Then reflect on how these gifts have moved into and through your life. Does it support awakening in the everyday? Is remembering easier, more accessible? How does it affect you now?

We invite you to write down what arises for you, and if you are so moved, e-mail us what you wrote and allow us to share it with our larger community via Metta’s quarterly newsletter or FaceBook page. Your testimonial is an invaluable service to others.

Beyond the inherently generous act of teaching the dhamma, dana is alive within Metta’s community. This spirit of giving is expressed in explicit and in discreet ways.  Volunteers and sangha organizers offer their energies to bring people together in practice. Metta volunteers are supported by a small administrative staff, and serve in a variety of capacities, aligned to the organization’s needs and volunteer interests. Each interpersonal contact with another’s generosity deepens and broadens the capacity of our community.

This foundation of reciprocity allows the Buddha’s teachings to flow from one to another. To support this process, Metta is currently seeking four audio evaluators and two audio editors to work with its Audio Team. This team reviews and edits the audio recordings of dharma talks, guided mediations and contemplations offered during retreat, and through these efforts the teachings are shared with the public through Metta’s website.

If you are inspired by the teachings, desire to deepen your practice, enjoy listening to audio recordings, and seek ways to contribute to Metta’s larger sangha, this unique opportunity is for you.

To read a description of these positions please visit the following links: Audio Evaluators and Audio Editors.

For more information and/or to be considered for a volunteer position, please contact Rachel Hien.

Metta’s Insight Dialogue Teacher Training Program held its annual retreat and meeting May 15-22 at the Won Dharma Center in Claverack, New York, a beautiful facility supportive of practice and study. The gathering was attended by a committed and diverse group of practitioners. Participants represented eight countries and included three monastics. In attendance were Gregory Kramer, Metta’s Guiding Teacher, four of Metta’s Senior Teachers, Gary Steinberg, Mary Burns, Phyllis Hicks, and Sharon-Beckman Brindley, five Insight Dialogue teacher trainees, and seven senior students who were invited to learn more about the Teacher Training Program.

Metta’s Teacher Training Program is conceived of as a learning and service community, with reciprocity and learning in relationship as core values. Therefore, Gregory, the Senior Teachers, and teacher trainees all shared together in developing the agenda for and leading the teacher training meeting. The gathering began with a day of silent practice followed by a two-day Insight Dialogue retreat led by Gregory and the Senior Teachers. Topics addressed during the subsequent meeting included using voice to transmit the teachings, developing contemplations from suttas, and giving Dhamma talks. There were also sessions on working with relational difficulties and time for personal sharing, focused on participants’ development and aspirations as Insight Dialogue teachers and dedicated Dhamma practitioners.

As Westerners on a spiritual path, we are called to inquire into how to live a good and wise life. In response, we have put together individualism and contemplative ideals with Asian meditation practices and come up with this heroic me, the individual meditator out to conquer the mind. Frankly, it’s not possible! Our forebears knew the importance of solitary practice, but they also knew it was part of a communal life.

In early Christianity and in Asia to this day, there is a sense of community in which the spiritual life is embedded, and out of that comes meditation and prayer practice. The formal practices are part of an entire lifestyle. When we take the contemplative practice out of the communal context, and put it together with a Protestant work ethic, our incredible intellects, and our individualistic society, it creates this warrior-hero-seeker, isolated and alone. This tragic hero has a genuinely hopeless task. We leave retreat or get off our hero’s reflective seat and go back into a society that is embedded in greed, aversion, and tremendous confusion. What then? We can go back on retreat another year, go back to church another Sunday, and get a little shot of deep-wisdom nourishment, but then go back all by ourselves again, alone, to live a spiritual life. It does not sound workable, does it?

It’s not. Not when you consider mind moments, where with each moment of arising, the inclination of the mind is being set and reset. This is neuroplasticity at work, the forming and re-forming of the brain and the body and its hormones around stress and acquisition. Our poor hero takes a step forward and a step back; a step forward and a step back. On the other hand, if we have the communal support for remembering, those mind moments can have support to go the other way, towards ease, towards freedom, towards wisdom, towards clear understanding.

But if we have this individualized heroic notion driving us, we will constantly be living like Sisyphus, the son of a king who is forever pushing a boulder up a hill. We are swimming alone against a powerful river of our own conditioning and the aggregate conditioning of a dysfunctional society. Wise teachers—the Buddha, Confucius, Jesus—knew this. Why do you think community was considered such a jewel in all of their teachings? What do you think monastics today have that we do not? It’s not the clothing! They have each other, to remind each other and to support the good, together. We have each other, too. We are not monastics, nor do we live in physical community. But if we chose to engage together–in meditation practice, study, and service–we have each other. We just have to wake up to that.

What does spiritual community look like when we incorporate our intentions towards not only healing, not only joy or service, but also the deepest wisdom of which we are capable? We touch the essence of this in relational meditation practice. Here, we are invited to touch the mind moments where our experience of ignorance and suffering is constructed. We do so with honesty. We also touch what is unbound. We have learned how to do this in Insight Dialogue practice, even though it was not part of our culture growing up. And we sustain that touch of truth because, together, there is stability of mindfulness and native kindness. We know the craving or thirst, but also touch the release. We know what it is like to wake up in a moment and to touch the texture of being awake together.

For many of us, we may have to learn what it is like to be awake together in these moment-by-moment encounters, because we have not learned it yet. Usually, we touch each other embedded in history, in constructions and wanting. The moment of deeply simple interpersonal contact—even a single moment—will guide us in a sense of what a community of awakening could look like. Sometimes we touch being awake together naturally in our daily encounters with each other. Absolutely!  But let’s also open to the value of formal meditation practice, because here we deepen, strengthen, and give real attention to our intention of relinquishment, together. Not alone, not on an isolated heroic quest, but awakening together. Together.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Gregory Kramer

Gregory Kramer, Ph.D., is the Founder and Guiding Teacher of Metta Programs and has been teaching Insight Meditation since 1980.  He developed the practice of Insight Dialogue and has been teaching it since 1995, offering retreats in North America, Asia, Europe, and Australia.  He has studied with esteemed teachers, including Anagarika Dhammadina, Ven. Ananda Maitreya, … Continue reading→

There are a few more spots still available in this summer’s Introduction to Online Insight Dialogue:

With Gary Steinberg, Mary Burns, and Antonella Commellato
June 5 – July 24, 2013

The Introduction to Online Insight Dialogue is an eight-week offering which covers the Insight Dialogue guidelines using the Four Noble Truths as a contemplative frame. The program focuses on the core elements of Relational Dhamma practiced in an online framework, and serves as a gateway for students to later enter the Whole Life Program, Metta … Continue reading →

The latest edition of our e-newsletter is now Available Here.

In this issue:

• Living the Teachings, by Gregory Kramer
• Partnering With Practice Groups
• Listening to Dhamma
• Video: Get Started in Metta’s Online Community
• Audio: Intimacy with Suffering and Joy
• Online Drop-in Sessions
• Retreats and Events Listing
• Poem: The Essential Nature of Mind, by Dudjom Rinpoch
• Contributors

To receive future e-newsletters in your email inbox, please use the sign-up in the lower right column of this page.

METTA SUPPORTS GROUPS DEDICATED TO A PATH OF WISDOM AND COMPASSION

Practicing Insight Dialogue in groups connects us and offers a community of spiritual friendship dedicated to a path of wisdom and compassion. Practicing together reminds us that we awaken, together. Together we gain practice toward integrating Insight Dialogue principles into our lives off the cushion, cultivating a Whole Life path.

Group practice of Insight Dialogue is straightforward and accessible: a practice group may be formed anywhere, in someone’s home or by meeting online. Insight Dialogue groups offer practice opportunities between retreats, reminding us of what is possible in relational awareness and in bringing the Dhamma into shared inquiry. Group practice may also serve as an entry portal for those who have not yet experienced Insight Dialogue.

Metta Programs can be a vital resource for practice communities, helping link them to Insight Dialogue teachers and practice materials. We seek to solidify our relationships with known groups and to invite unidentified or emerging communities of practice to join in this partnership. Acquiring a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of how diverse groups conduct their practice, how they are organized and what support they wish for their community, allows us to more effectively support all communities in their investigation. In the coming weeks, Metta will be reaching out to solicit feedback on exactly these questions. If you are a member of a practice group and feel moved to offer your ideas, please contact Rachel.

If you would like to join an existing group, please visit our groups page to see if there is a group listed in your region, or consider dropping into one of our online sessions.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. – Franz Kafka

Insight Dialogue and relational dhamma audio teachings are shared by Metta through our website, newsfeeds and Facebook. Currently we have over 1,000 audio recordings from Insight Dialogue retreats all over the world from 2005 to present time, a small amount of these available to the public through our Teachings Library. In addition, Metta has forged a unique partnership with Dharmaseed, a website dedicated to preserving and sharing the spoken teachings of Theravada Buddhism, to support us with general warehousing of our audio materials.

To help us sort through this treasure chest and enhance our Teachings Library with these gems, Metta is pleased to announce the launch of its new Audio Project, spearheaded by Kyle Raub, Metta’s volunteer Audio Manager. Kyle shares a commitment to the Buddha’s path and has a rich background in Creative Development and Auditory Design. With Kyle’s leadership, Metta is developing a system to optimize the quality and accessibility of audio recordings.

The Audio Project has four distinct phases:

1. Develop a database
2. Evaluate recoded content and use
3. Edit recordings for optimal quality and upload into the database
4. Develop systems and middleware (computer software that connects the database with our website) to facilitate the delivery and increase accessibly of the teachings

So far, we have a new database that allows us to organize and archive recordings for specific audiences and uses. During these next two phases, Metta seeks volunteer support in two different categories:

Audio Evaluators: people to listen to recordings for quality and content
Audio Editors: people with a good ear and technical know-how

If you are interested and qualified, this is great project to immerse yourself in the dhamma while giving generously to the Metta community. In the near future, Metta will also be looking for support to help build its middleware, which will allow us to enhance search and download capabilities.

Stay tuned for more exciting developments in this project.

A program announcement from our friends at Spirit Rock

Heavenly Messengers
Awakening Through Illness, Aging and Death

A two-year program drawing on the practice and study of classical teachings and contemporary approaches to illness, aging, death and the potentialities of awakening, and in mindful and compassionate companionship to others facing these experiences.

Fall 2013 – Fall 2015
Applications due May 1, 2013
Visit the Spirit Rock website for further information.

Nestled in between the mountains and the water in beautiful British Columbia, a small but spirited group meets monthly to practice Insight Dialogue. The Vancouver sangha formed in 2010 following Gregory Kramer’s retreat in Whistler, BC.

Subsequently, this sangha, largely supported by the efforts of Lucy Leu, initiated the first Cascadia Retreat. This year will see the third annual event in May, beginning with a six-day Insight Dialogue retreat with Gregory Kramer and Mary Burns, followed by a unique three-day session to deepen the practice and build skills for taking the practice home with us, into our “real world.”

To find out more about this group, or other groups around the world, visit our Local Practice Groups page.