Buddhadharma & Insight Meditation Practices

Select Teachings By Topic

Mindfulness of the Body

The ability to be mindful of the body is fundamental to liberating the mind. Read the following article and listen to the suggested audio dharma talks, and then deepen your understanding of the teachings by contemplating the reflections provided below.

How to Meditate

Mindfulness meditation begins with learning to concentrate your attention on an object, typically the breath, which enables you to notice how your mind is reacting to what it is experiencing.

Starting a Mindfulness Meditation Practice

As a meditation teacher, I’m often solicited for advice by students who are seeking to change their lives in some way. They may want to alter an aspect of their behavior or their emotional life, or improve their relations with others.

How Pleasant & Unpleasant Feelings Prevent Conscious Choice

It this talk we discuss the Second Foundation of Mindfulness: Noting the pleasant-, unpleasant-, or neutral-feeling tone that accompanies every moment’s experience.

Mindfulness of the Body

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness

The Buddha taught what are often called the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, in which you systematically learn how to pay attention to and investigate what arises in your mind, whether the experience comes from one of your five body senses or from the mind generating thought.

What Does It Mean to Awaken in the Body?

You can learn to utilize mindfulness of the body as a way of training yourself to stay present in this very moment.

Awakening in the Body

When you choose to be present with your body when it is in pain or when it is feeling the tension and contraction caused by your wanting mind, you are accepting your life experience just as it is, in this moment, without clinging.

Maintaining Mindfulness in Daily Life

Instead of staying mindful of whatever is happening in the moment, we immediately begin to interpret our experience and create a story based on past associations and attitudes we have about ourselves and others. However, our interpretation is

Starting a Mindfulness Meditation Practice

Mindfulness in the Context of Right View

Right view is also referred to as wise understanding because it empowers you to live in harmony with life just as it is.

4 Things Unique to the Buddha’s Teachings

Conditionality (the law of cause and effect), the Four Noble Truths, the practice of mindful awareness, and the power of self-reliance differentiate Buddhism from other spiritual traditions.

The Four Noble Truths As Practice

The Buddha’s Four Noble Truths are more than a philosophical statement; they’re also a practice that leads you to the realization of important insights.

Embodied Awareness of the Four Noble Truths

Through mindfulness of the body, you begin to see why the Buddha began with the First Noble Truth, dukkha, the stress and anxiety interwoven in all life.

The Roots of Suffering: Greed, Aversion, and Delusion

The Buddha taught that the origins of suffering are greed, aversion, and delusion, which he called the Three Unwholesome Roots.

The Four Noble Truths

All things are constantly changing, even what is most precious to you. You know that you and those you love will die, but you don’t know when or how. This is the existential dilemma of life, and the price of being a conscious human being. It is simply the way life is constructed.

Mindfulness in the Context of Right View

Right view is also referred to as wise understanding because it empowers you to live in harmony with life just as it is.

Right Effort: Seeking the Charged

Right effort refers to how you pay attention. You cultivate and train your mind in order to shift your attention from one object or thought pattern to another.

How Intention and Energy Support Concentration

As you develop your concentration practice, you access more energy and it becomes more available to your mindfulness practice.

Awareness of Awareness

This is a series of three dharma talks on awareness that Phillip Moffitt gave at a daylong retreat at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies on April 20, 2013. Listening to all three talks sequentially can provide the context for doing a personal retreat at home.

Patience and Determination

Patience is the ability to stay present in a moment without being defined by restlessness. Determination is unceasing persistence. A balance of patience and determination brings sustainability.

Integrating Right Intention in Your Life

Your journey to well-being in daily life and ultimate liberation begins with right intention. Read the following article and listen to the suggested audio dharma talk, and then deepen your understanding of the teachings by contemplating the reflections provided below.

The Rewards of Right Action

It’s not always easy to identify what right action is, but mindfulness and compassion can help you gain this wisdom.

The Promise of Karma

In this moment a number of different karmic seeds are blossoming in your life. You can effect how this moment unfolds by being mindful and cultivating wise intention.

Do the Right Thing

Doing the right thing when it’s difficult has a cumulative effect over time because you let loose, at least in that moment, of the attachment to your own well-being, and you discover, “I survived that one!” It also increases the possibility of your doing the right thing again in the future.

Finding Possibility in All That Arises and Passes

Whatever arises has to vanish. If you’re living for the future achievement, you’re missing the beauty of now.

Two Facets of Wisdom

If you give yourself the chance to investigate your suffering more deeply, you will discover that being “with” your pain can lead to wisdom and happiness.

Wise Living

When we surrender, we are relinquishing our demand that the present be something other than it actually is and we are fostering a willingness to be present with what is.

The Heart’s Intention

Cultivating right intention does not mean you abandon goals. You continue to use them, but they exist within a larger context of meaning that offers the possibility of peace beyond the fluctuations caused by pain and pleasure, gain and loss.

Core Values and Essential Intentions

Many people lack clarity about their goals, values, and intentions. We often lump them together and delineate them in varying ways. As we live out the chaos of our lives, it is inevitable that our goals, values, and intentions become enmeshed.

The Unfolding of the Path

In this talk from the Spirit Rock Meditation Center Fall 2019 retreat, Phillip explores the unfolding of the path in the context of the origin story of the Buddha.

Fear and Uncertainty

Recognizing the truth of anicca (that everything is impermanent) can be helpful in coping with fear. When fear arises we can self-soothe through relaxation and surrender.

Fear, Part 2

In this talk, Phillip Moffitt stresses the importance of loving-kindness as an antidote to fear. He responds to questions on the topic of fear from yogis.

Fear, Part 1

Fear is an emotional response to a perception received through one of the sense gates. There are different types of fear. A difficult challenge is to know what is true when our nervous system is activated.

What Might Have Been

We cling to the past in many different ways. This talk explores utilizing Vipassana Meditation as a means to let go and obtain more freedom.

The Need for Renunciation

When you see the harm that being a slave to your desires creates, it naturally leads to renunciation. Read the following article and listen to the suggested audio dharma talk, and then deepen your understanding of the teachings by contemplating the reflections provided below.

The Dharma of Disappointment

If you embrace disappointment as your teacher, life itself is not disappointing. Read the following article and listen to the suggested audio dharma talk, and then deepen your understanding of the teachings by contemplating the reflections provided below.

Embodied Awareness of the Four Noble Truths

Through mindfulness of the body, you begin to see why the Buddha began with the First Noble Truth, dukkha, the stress and anxiety interwoven in all life.

Working with Difficult Emotions

Phillip Moffitt, Co-Guiding Teacher at Spirit Rock and author of “Dancing with Life,” talks about how to use mindfulness practice to work with difficult or strong emotions such as anger

The Roots of Suffering: Greed, Aversion, and Delusion

The Buddha taught that the origins of suffering are greed, aversion, and delusion, which he called the Three Unwholesome Roots.

Freedom from Fear

Living in a fear-based culture inevitably affects your state of mind and the decisions you make. As a citizen you may become more compliant, more willing to surrender your rights for vague promises of safety. As an employee you are less demanding, less willing to take risks.

Living with Disappointment

In becoming an adult you learned how to cope with disappointment, or else you wouldn’t be able to function at all. Yet, the conundrum remains: If you’ve learned to live with disappointments, then why does it still take so much of your energy to cope?

The Tyranny of Expectations

When you practice staying in the “sacred now,” the future will take care of itself as well as is possible. My teacher the Venerable Ajahn Sumedho calls this “trusting your practice.” It is an acknowledgment that you cannot know the mysteries of how life unfolds

Understanding Your Sense of Identity

Through the Buddhist practice of mindfulness you realize that clinging to your sense of identity creates a separate self, which the Buddha said is the source of all suffering.

Freedom from Wanting More

Wanting more is a phenomenon of our time, a reflection of the way we live, and yet it’s something that is very seldom recognized as being a phenomenon. It conditions our behavior without our realizing it. We never notice that it often precedes our emotions or actions.

Getting Past Fear

Finding Equanimity in Meditation

Practice keeping the mind balanced when physical sensations and sounds arise during meditation. The mind can stay balanced even during the unexpected.

Compassion Practice

Karuna, or compassion, is a state of mind/heart that can be cultivated as a practice. Compassion is an intuitive response to someone else’s suffering, or your own.

Being and the Brahma-viharas

When the mind is not caught in grasping, it dwells in the Four Heavenly Abodes. Read the following article and listen to the suggested audio dharma talks, and then deepen your understanding of the teachings by contemplating the reflections provided In this guide.

Loving Kindness (Metta) for the Body Meditation

Receive with equanimity the experience of knowing the body in this moment without judging, comparing, or fixing. What’s true in the body just now?

Exploring Equanimity

Equanimity (Upekkha) is a balanced state of mind that is characterized by a benevolent attitude toward all beings as well as an accepting attitude toward the ever changing conditions of life.

Sympathetic Joy Meditation

Cultivating sympathetic joy—one of the four brahma-viharas—benefits everyone in that it adds to the joy in the world. When we open to the joy of others, we are cultivating the responsive capacity of our hearts.

Anger: A Pair of Rulers

Anger is traditionally taught as one of the five hindrances and as an aspect of aversion. This talk examines anger through a story. With which of the characters in this story do you most closely identify — the prince king, queen, teacher, warrior, or apprentice?

The Fruits of Forgiveness

The primary beneficiary of forgiveness practice is you. Read the following article and listen to the suggested audio dharma talk, and then deepen your understanding of the teachings by contemplating the reflections provided below.

Lost in Doubt?

Last year while teaching a month-long silent meditation retreat with several other vipassana teachers, we were faced with what to do about a yogi who was not fully participating. He wasn’t showing up for the sittings or attending the dharma talks, and he was avoiding

Subduing Anger

No matter what degree of anger we experience, we can practice mindfully being with it. If worked with mindfully, anger can become another moment of awakening.

Working Mindfully with Anger

You can feel anger toward another or yourself. Your anger can be justified or unjustified. If your anger is justified, you’ve got two possibilities: You can either do something about it, or you can’t. Therefore, there’s no cause for melodrama, which simply

The Antidote to Doubt

Read article and listen to dharma talks about the many faces of doubt by Phillip Moffitt. Deepen your understanding of the different kinds of doubt that manifest in your spiritual practice and life and discover why faith is the antidote to doubt.

Finding Equanimity in Meditation

Practice keeping the mind balanced when physical sensations and sounds arise during meditation. The mind can stay balanced even during the unexpected.

How Intention and Energy Support Concentration

As you develop your concentration practice, you access more energy and it becomes more available to your mindfulness practice.

Fully Arriving In The Here And Now Meditation

This is a guided meditation that can help you stay in the present, here and now. Here, now, not before, not after. There is no presence, no agency in the past. It’s a memory of something gone, no longer present.

Happiness Here and Now

Mindfulness of your happiness can be a gateway to liberation. Read the following article and listen to the suggested audio dharma talk, and then deepen your understanding of the teachings by contemplating the reflections provided below.

Embodied Awareness of the Four Noble Truths

Through mindfulness of the body, you begin to see why the Buddha began with the First Noble Truth, dukkha, the stress and anxiety interwoven in all life.

What Does It Mean to Awaken in the Body?

You can learn to utilize mindfulness of the body as a way of training yourself to stay present in this very moment.

Expanding Your Capacity of Knowing

In this meditation, Phillip Moffitt guides you through an investigation of body and breath with unfiltered knowing. When we are in the rawness of our experience rather than our

Awakening in the Body

Maintaining Mindfulness in Daily Life

Realizing Your True Nature

There are a few individuals for whom life itself seems to offer the perfect balance of these practices, but it is foolhardy to decide you are such a person. For most of us practice is essential; it is the only way that we can consciously experience and

Patience and Persistence: Two Empowerments from the Paramis

Endurance, steadfastness, and clarity can be cultivated in practicing the paramis of patience and persistence.

The Need for Renunciation

Loving Kindness (Metta) for the Body Meditation

Receive with equanimity the experience of knowing the body in this moment without judging, comparing, or fixing. What’s true in the body just now?

Meaning of the Pali Word “Dana”

In the Buddhist tradition, the teachings are given freely because they are considered priceless; in the Buddhist tradition we also practice dana, or generosity, by making monetary offerings for the teachings. Dana is not payment for goods or services rendered;

Investigating the First Four Paramis

We can use the circumstances of our lives to develop the first four paramis: generosity, ethical behavior, renunciation, and wisdom.

Reflections on the Splendor of Generosity

True generosity arises out of unconditional caring and compassion for another. Each of us is dependent upon others for our blessings. We flourish or perish together through interwoven acts of generosity.

Exploring Equanimity

Equanimity (Upekkha) is a balanced state of mind that is characterized by a benevolent attitude toward all beings as well as an accepting attitude toward the ever changing conditions of life.

Opening to Love

Every Sunday evening the Turtle Island Yoga Studio in San Rafael, California, is transformed into a vipassana meditation hall. A large silk painting of the Buddha, which I commissioned from a street artist in New Delhi for just this purpose, hangs on the front wall, and all the yoga mats are laid out around

Generosity: The Gateway to Freedom

Why be generous? Dana, or generosity, is a gateway to well-being and freedom. This talk explores the many forms of generosity, obstacles to generosity, fear of generosity, and the shadow side of generosity.

The Gift of Generosity

Every year at this time, I am reminded of a lesson in generosity that I received many years ago. As a teenager living in the Appalachian Mountains, I worked as a bag boy in a supermarket. To my dismay, it was the working poor who were most likely to give tips, people who often seemed