Dhamma talkSasanarakkha Buddhist Sanctuary Retreat17 Jan 2023
07 concluding talk — Continuing Practice and Motivating Awareness at Home
Sayadaw U Tejaniya · 54 min
Original audio: Burmese · English interpretation
0:00−54:26
AI-written summary
The Dhamma talk encourages meditators to sustain their practice at home after retreat. The teacher advises appreciating small moments of awareness and maintaining a positive attitude. Patiently gathering moments of awareness throughout daily life brings peace and wisdom.
Topics
Talks in this retreat
Sasanarakkha Buddhist Sanctuary Retreat · 7 talks
- 11 hr 39 min01 Zoom Q&A group A — Open Awareness, Working with Expectations and Overthinking6 Jan 2023
- 22 hr 16 min02 Zoom Q&A group B — Recognizing Hindrances and Appreciating Awareness8 Jan 2023
- 31 hr 57 min03 Zoom Q&A group A — Awareness of Thinking, Handling Restlessness, and Attitude10 Jan 2023
- 42 hr 42 min04 Zoom Q&A group B — Attitude Towards Defilements and Discontent12 Jan 2023
- 52 hr 8 min05 Zoom Q&A group A and B — Attitude and Appreciating Awareness14 Jan 2023
- 61 hr 45 min06 Zoom Q&A group A and B — Being Happy with Awareness and Checking Attitude16 Jan 2023
- Viewing754 min07 concluding talk — Continuing Practice and Motivating Awareness at Home17 Jan 2023
Transcript
English
For today's recording: 17 January 2023, concluding talk by Sayadaw U Tejaniya at Sasanaraka Buddhist Sanctuary via Zoom. Thank you so much, Sayadaw, for agreeing to give us this concluding talk, and thank you, Matech, for translating. Sure.
[Burmese segment]
English
Producer, so,
English
you know,
English
every time a retreat concludes, in these short retreats, Seattle reminds us to go home and practice. And he's tried to motivate yogis to go home and continue practicing in so many ways, Seattle says. And so, if you have heard the talks, you have heard them, you have seen that it's been— the content has been many and varied, but the purpose has always been the same: the goal is to, hopefully, to inspire you, motivate you to continue trying to practice it.
[Burmese segment]
English
So when he was young and practiced with his teacher, he said he'd been on
English
various lengths of retreat with his teacher. He has stayed there 10 days, 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, 8 months, 1.5 years. He said, "But every time—" and multiple times, yeah, any of these, many of these. And every time he went home, he said his teacher didn't say much.
English
His teacher said very little. He said, and usually it was the same, this same instruction, which was: when you get home, continue practicing. He would also sometimes say, "Don't leave the practice here at the monastery."
[Burmese segment]
English
So all of you
English
may have different motivations for coming on retreat, yeah? Different things that
English
impel you to practice, yeah.
[Burmese segment]
English
And among these motivations that you have for coming to practice, one of them is that you want to come on retreat so that you can practice more continuously. You can make your mindfulness more continuous. Another one of these motivations is that you want to understand the truth about the mind and body more deeply. And also, Seattle said— .
English
Another thing is that you all actually
English
have understood that there are some benefits to meditation, and that's why you come on a retreat.
[Burmese segment]
English
So for, you know, when we are new to meditation, or when we are learning meditation, he says one of the key—one of our key lessons is learning how to tune in, right? How to, like,
English
turn this, like, radar of awareness on ourselves and not feel identified with it. Not to, you know, to see it as an interesting phenomenon to observe, right? That's one of the key things that we want to learn from doing the practice.
[Burmese segment]
English
And one of the key lessons that
English
sort of signal that we know how to practice, we have learned how to practice, Seattle said, is that no matter whether our experiences are
English
pleasant or unpleasant, the mind begins to just find it interesting. It's an interesting phenomenon to observe. And when we see it that way, that's when we know the mind is neutral. The mind is no longer swayed. It's no longer thinking that a bad experience shouldn't happen, or a good experience, it thinks that it should try to find out how to make it last longer.
English
Instead of feeling that way, the mind finds every experience interesting and equally interesting. So, and in that, the mind is neutral. And then you know that you know how to practice. That, you know, you can kind of—yeah.
English
So we come on retreat to kind of fine-tune these skills, see whether we can get into that drift, into that flow.
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Sayadaw U Tejaniya began his Buddhist training as a young teenager in Burma under the late Shwe Oo Min Sayadaw (1913–2002). After a career in business and life as a householder, he has become a permanent monk since 1996.…