Dhamma talkNirodha Insight Meditation in Finland Retreat1 Jun 2019
Week 1 day 8 — Practicing at Home and Cultivating Wholesome Qualities
Sayadaw U Tejaniya · 36 min
Original audio: Burmese · English interpretation
0:00−36:33
Uses compressed audio.
AI-written summary
The teacher encourages yogis to continue practicing at home, viewing daily life as the true retreat. By maintaining awareness day by day and recognizing mental reactions, wholesome qualities develop, enabling one to handle life's challenges skillfully.
Topics
Talks in this retreat
Nirodha Insight Meditation in Finland Retreat · 33 talks
- 71 hr 33 minWeek 1 day 5 group C — Cause and Effect, Right Effort, and Letting Go of Expectations29 May 2019
- 82 hr 20 minWeek 1 day 6 group A — The Meditating Mind, Balancing Effort and Observing Defilements30 May 2019
- 91 hr 4 minWeek 1 day 6 group B — Superficial Awareness and Observing Reactions to Suffering30 May 2019
- 101 hr 53 minWeek 1 day 7 group C — Recognizing the Mind at Work and Working with Lobha31 May 2019
- Viewing1137 minWeek 1 day 8 — Practicing at Home and Cultivating Wholesome Qualities1 Jun 2019
- 121 hr 47 minWeek 2 day 1 group A1 — Talking Meditation and Working with Defilements1 Jun 2019
- 131 hr 10 minWeek 2 day 1 group A2 — Wisdom at Work, Subconscious Mind, and Decision-Making1 Jun 2019
- 1459 minWeek 2 day 2 group D — Recognizing Thoughts as Mind and Working with Judging Mind2 Jun 2019
- 1528 minWeek 2 day 2 group E — Maintaining Awareness and Observing Mental Habits2 Jun 2019
- 162 hr 6 minWeek 2 day 3 group A1 — Attitude Toward Experiences, Greed, and Reality3 Jun 2019
Transcript
English
Hear me from the back? Good. Okay. Is it okay? Okay.
English
Okay.
English
So Saras has— he's just going to repeat what he says at the end of every retreat.
English
Lê, Lê, Lê, Lê, Lê. Lê, Lê, Lê. Lê, Lê. Lê, Lê. Lê, Lê. . He said, "Because—" Anh ." So that's because it's his responsibility to tell us this. And his teacher used to do that too. Every time he would go home from a retreat, his teacher would say, "When you get home, keep practicing, keep practicing."
English
But he said he never did.
English
But then when he got into big trouble, he said, "Finally, one day, he got around to doing what his teacher told him to do," and practiced at home.
English
And when he really began to practice at home, and he began to do it
English
persistently, consistently, and over a long period of time, he says then he began to understand the nature of practicing the Dharma, of meditation. . And what he really understood was that you can't stop practicing the Dharma. You need to always practice the Dharma.
[Burmese segment]
English
. Because
English
in the end, Siara says, our mind is made up of just two qualities in general: wholesome qualities and unwholesome qualities.
English
Yeah. He says, so we always have to cultivate the wholesome, practice the wholesome qualities of minds so that they're there. Because if the wholesome minds are not, are not what's taking place, then it's the unwholesome minds that will take that place.
English
And he says, when we forget to
English
keep cultivating wholesome qualities of mind, Siara says, not only do the unwholesome qualities start to take their place, they start to grow. They start to multiply. . And then life starts to become busy, complicated, boiling.
English
He says, boiling and messy.
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That's the word he used. And it's not that we can't live that way. Not that we can't let the mind be noisy and messy and all that. He says, because we have lived like that before.
English
He said, and there are many people who live like that. But he says, the difference becomes when we know that it's like that, and we didn't really realize it is like that. He says, when we know it's like that, he says, we start to have a choice to decide.
English
. Whether we want to live life. . We start to have the choice to decide whether we want to live life peacefully in a balanced way. Whether we want to live life, whether we want a stable life, a mature mind, a meaningful life.
English
He says, that becomes a choice we have. Yeah. And that's why right from the beginning he said, the practice of meditation is the cultivation of the wholesome qualities of our mind, growing the wholesome qualities of the mind.
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Tiara says, and some yogis ask him, "Until when must we keep practicing this way?
English
When do we, when can we stop?" And Siara's answer is, always check your mind. If, whenever you come across events, situations, persons, the experiences of our lives, he says, check to see what the mind's response is. Is it wholesome or unwholesome? And if every time we have an experience, our response to it is wholesome, Siara says, then we are there.
English
So he says, the whole pattern of our minds will become upside down. He says, if we look at our mental reactions and responses now, so often, he says, we see something, we experience something, and our instant reactions can be aversion or craving.
English
Aversion or craving. ? He says, our awareness is crawling to catch up, crawling to catch up with the reactions that we have. reaction.
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He says, there's a reaction. Let's go after it. On all fours, still crawling.
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He says, awareness isn't there first. It's not first on the block. It's always the others.
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He says, in our lives, there are our mental actions, our verbal actions, and our bodily actions, but everything is led from the mind.
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The mental actions, they come first. And he says, our mind, the what we call mental actions, he says, it's like a process. Our whole life is basically
English
the unfolding process of the mind doing its work. He says, and what we're trying to do is, in that unfolding of the mental processes that are happening, we're trying to include
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sati, samādhi, and paññā. Awareness, stability of mind, and wisdom. We want those to be a part of the process of the unfolding of the mind.
English
So there's so much to understand, Siara says. So we can do lots of practice. There's lots to discover and lots more to do.
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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.…