[...]... awareness of the mind and thoughts, and awareness of the principles that govern life (In Sanskrit these principles are called the dharma, or the universal laws.) The development of awareness in these four areas is the basis for all of the Buddhist practices of insight and awakening The power of sustained awareness is always healing and opening, and the ways to extend it to every area of life are taught... body and heart as a vehicle for spiritual practice The core of the meditations presented here comes from the Theravada Buddhist tradition of Southeast Asia These are the mindfulness practices of Insight Meditation (vipassana), also called the heart of Buddhist meditation, which offer a systematic training and awakening of body, heart, and mind that is integrated with the world around us It is this tradition... teachers.) Another kind of healing takes place when we begin to bring the power of awareness and loving attention to each area of our life with the systematic practice of mindfulness The Buddha spoke of cultivating awareness in four fundamental aspects of life that he called the Four Foundations of Mindfulness These areas of mindfulness are: awareness of the body and senses, awareness of the heart and feelings,... hearts, and then make a commitment to follow it as long as it takes to transform ourselves This is the outward aspect of taking the one seat Once we have made the outward choice among the many paths available and have begun a systematic practice, we often find ourselves assailed from within by doubts and fears, by all the feelings that we have never dared experience Eventually all of the dammed-up pain of. .. refugee family would walk a mile and stand for half an hour in a long line at the pit well at the far end of the camp and carry back a bucket of water for their plants It was a beautiful, beautiful thing to see these gardens in the middle of this camp in the dry season, when you could barely believe that anything would grow on such a hot barren field As these war-shattered families planted and watered their... joys and sorrows, pleasant events and unpleasant events, individuals, nations, even civilizations, arise and pass away Take the one seat of a Buddha and rest with a heart of equanimity and compassion in the center of it all Sit this way, dignified and present, for as long as you wish After some time, still feeling centered and steady, open your eyes Then let yourself stand up and take some steps, walking... seat we discover our capacity to be unafraid and awake in the midst of all life We may fear that our heart is not capable of weathering the storms of anger or grief or terror that have been stored up for so long We may have a fear of accepting all of life, what Zorba the Greek called, the Whole Catastrophe.” But to take the one seat is to discover that we are unshakable We discover that we can face... dry and barren land of the Cambodian refugee camps that I had visited to assist After the Cambodian holocaust only parts of families had survived a mother and three children, an old uncle and two nephews and each was given a little bamboo hut about four feet wide, six feet long, and five feet high In front of each hut was a little patch of land perhaps no bigger than one square yard After only a few... Instead they have sampled the numerous traditions that are now available in the West They have been initiated by lamas, done Sufi dancing in the mountains, sat a Zen retreat or two, and participated in shamanic rituals, and yet they ask: Why am I still unhappy? Why am I caught in the same old struggles? Why haven’t my years of practice changed anything? Why hasn’t my spiritual practice progressed? And. .. of peace and nonviolence Then they took us to one end of the island where on top of a hill was an enormous sixty-foot-tall statue of a standing Buddha Just next to Buddha stood an equally tall statue of Jesus They had their arms around each other’s shoulders, smiling While helicopter gunships flew by and war raged around them, Buddha and Jesus stood there like brothers expressing compassion and healing . had read a bit of Alan Watts, and when he faced this moment, that is what he drew on and what he wanted to talk about: his spiritual life and understanding of birth and death. After a most heartfelt. Buddhist tradition of Southeast Asia. These are the mindfulness practices of Insight Meditation (vipassana), also called the heart of Buddhist meditation, which offer a systematic training and awakening. experience of the mindscape and heart rhythm of the spiritual, and particularly the meditative, journey. With an open-hearted expertise rare in a Westerner, Jack offers a benevolent travelogue along the