exploring authentic Buddhist practice in our times

Just a quick note to say that if I don’t post here for a few weeks you needn’t send out a search party.

I am going for a four week training on emptiness at Gaia House on Wednesday and therefore my blogging self shall not be around for a little while.

I shall however no doubt return with tales and inarticulation so I look forward to both the training and the return.

yours,

Rohan

photo credit: reynardkarman

Yes I too have succumbed to the ubiquitous practice of list-writing.  And while it may be a little cliché to compile a Top Ten at the end of the year, taking the time to review learning at a point of closing can be of enormous value, be that at the end of a meditation sitting or at the end of a year.  Or indeed a decade, should you be that bold.

In any case, this is a Top 9.  I hope it’s of some use.  It certainly has been for me.

[And please note that it can be really quite hard to write briefly about this sort of learning without the catchphrases sounding too much like generic spiritual aphorisms.  Please have my word that behind each one is a level of understanding that I'm just not eloquent enough to articulate.]

Lesson 1: I am not a monk. This is a fairly self-evident statement but the full understanding of it has only really done its work this year.  Living a fully engaged urban digital relational like (aka a normal life) while practising in a tradition that has a powerful monastic inheritance by definition results in a tension.   That has always been the case and perhaps always will but what has been different is that I now own it as a creative tension.  I now fully recognise this creative tension as the central narrative of my life – one which started in 2003 when I first started getting into Buddhist practice at pretty much the same time as I started work as a management consultant.  This blog is a fruit of that tension as is my new experiment The Hear&Now Project.

Lesson 2: the body is Silence. This is one of those things that I can’t really explain in any satisfactory way.  I was sitting at the Insight Meditation Society around Easter time and this statement hit me like a loving punch in the stomach.  Silence had been a theme of my practice for some time and the sheer obviousness of this viscerally-felt statement was like a blessing.

Lesson 3: technology and dharma are closer than they thing.  In many spiritual scenes, technology is seen as a threat.  And while that is understandable it’s also most likely generational.  As someone who has spent some time working in the area of digital and social innovation I am so excited aboutw what I see.  And what I see is an emerging web culture which is exploring issues such as openness, the economics of free and how online communities can lead to social action.  These are the same issues any practitioner of authentic spirituality gets into but we tend to give them fancy names like dana and sangha.  Might I go so far as to say that What Would Google Do by Jeff Jarvis and Free by Chris Anderson were the most important spiritual books published this year?  Oh look…I just have.

Lesson 4: romantic relationship make practice immediate. This has been a big year for me with regards understanding relational practice and I’ve gone into some detail into this elsewhere.  Being part of a committed intimate relationship by definition makes one’s sense of the world that little bit bigger with one’s partner offering infinite opportunities to connect and surrender.  And the icing of the cake is that being in love is a proximate cause of concentration…cool eh?

Lesson 5: time does not really exist (although it sort of does). Time, it’s passage and the restless that it’s passage invites has been a theme of my practice since day 1.   And now as I develop the ability to see the world as not-self, the relationship to time also has unhooked.  Perhaps the two – time and self -  are related?  I remember a mentor of mine once telling me that Krishnamurti said that time was just a movement in thought.  This year I’ve started to understand what that means.

Lesson 6: a simple definition of practice is a useful definition of practice.  When describing my practice, to myself and to others, I’ve often been rather confused.  And this confusion invariably leads to diffusion of energy and focus…because if you’re not clear what you are doing then how do you know you are doing it?  Again it was around Easter time when a simple definition of my practice came to me and it’s been of enormous value ever since.  It’s a simple two part formula: Be Quiet…and Hold a Question.

Lesson 7: it is a marathon AND a sprint.  It is of course a common saying that practice is a marathon not a sprint.  At first reading this means that it should be taken slowly…but I now realise otherwise.  Have you ever watched world-class marathon runners?  They run FAST.  ALL the time.  For a LONG way.  And when they take breaks they are still running faster than most people can spring.

Lesson 8: I’m just making this thing called life and practice up as I go along. But that’s ok because it’s based on a commitment to wise intention.

Lesson 9. This is sangha. 2009 is the first full year of my writing here at 21awake.com and it’s a constant surprise that anyone gains value from my ramblings which are ultimately means for me to reflect on my own life and its learning.  Thank you to everyone who has read, commented, linked and shared.  This is sangha.

See you in 2010.

Nate over at the Precious Metal blog had a brain-bubble about having a blog swap for some Buddhist bloggers. The plan was for any interested Buddhist bloggers to throw their names in for a random drawing of which blog they will guest write on as well as who would be featured on their blog. I was extremely fortunate to have opportunity to post over here at 21awake, a blog that I follow and respect, as well as having Marcus from Marcus’ Journal post over at my site, Sweep the Dust, Push the Dirt.

Anyway, Rohan offered the topic of “what surprised me about the results of my Zen practice”. This topic is a difficult one to approach since I have been struggling over posting about this for a few months now. I hope to avoid the trap that many people fall into when they discuss spiritual pursuits.  It is very easy to fall into metaphysical analysis or analogy rather than examining the actual results.  So I hope that this description of mine stays firmly footed in the “real” and grounded effects of my Zen practice, but don’t expect too much.

It started with my wife’s pregnancy.   The upcoming birth of my daughter (now 16 months old) and the need to find a new, higher paying (and higher stress) job to support us led to my revitalization of my Zen practice – a practice largely left discarded since I graduated college and one that was largely a nightstand approach (a few Buddha books beside the bed). I realized that I needed to prepare for this change and the standard mental “get psyched” preparations would not cut it. I was worried and scared.  I needed to deal with me in this moment before I could ever be the person that would be able to care for and handle these new responsibilities. If you require the full story of what proved to be the impetus to restarting my practice go here for the complete and unflattering story.

Explosive vs. Intense

One of the most salient aspects of Zen practice as well as one of the most surprising was the effect on my emotional outlook. For the most part I am (or was?) a stubborn, over-reacting and explosive person. This was one of the main reasons for restarting my practice – to control the emotions that I know I have. The surprising part was how, in the beginning, I expected to “control” this aspect of my personality. Rather than gaining any amount of conscious control over my emotions; my explosiveness just began to dissipate slowly as my practice progressed. This isn’t to say that I am not an intense person- I am, but my predilection towards exploding emotionally just began to cease gradually.

The expectation I had at the onset of my practice was that I would gain a more complete understanding of myself and why I act and think the way I do.  I expected increased introspection would lead to an eventual understanding of my self and then control over it.  It was all very psychological and grounded in a self-help mentality.

I didn’t gain anything through my practice, least of all control over my emotions.  What I did experience was a gradual change in how I reacted to my environments.  But even that assumes some amount of control.  I never mentally control myself.  My self is just not as controlling.

I still get frustrated and annoyed by the daily grind of life but those moments pass by now rather than fester. Moments are moments and I engage with them in their own turn. I don’t reject or indulge in my emotional experience but nor do I assume to understand the nature of my mind or the origins of my emotions.  I just don’t let myself get intimidated or bound by them.

The best description would be an intense engagement of the moment.  That present moment includes my environments, my self and those around me.  Ordinarily, I think I ignored the “myself” part of that equation and assumed that it wasn’t part of my environment.

Feeling Gratitude

I feel engaged with my practice (it is part of the moment, after all). Rather than sitting back and allowing my practice to unfold before me; I strive towards it every moment I can. Far from being a “marshmallow on a cushion” my practice is a focused activity that stretches between my marriage, raising my daughter, chopping wood, doing dishes, living in the middle of no-where, writing reports/memos, blogging and the 84,000 other subtle gestures that I partake in everyday. This was surprising to me after being filled with the ideal of “Zen™” being soft and unfocused like a cheap glamour-shot taken at the Mall – A practice full of incense and bowing and chanting.

So I was surprised that Zen practice existed outside of the Zendo and off of the cushion but was equally surprised that I could gain such a feeling of gratitude by engaging in the practices that I thought to be mere “cultural baggage”.  Those idealized aspects that I listed about (incense, bowing and chanting) were initially rejected because I didn’t see the purpose behind them.  For me, starting out, practice was meditation and meditation was practice.  Everything else was rejected.

Well, either rejecting or indulging in those aspects of practice is equally worthless.  They need to be seen as just practice.  Meditation, chanting or bowing; dishes, wood-chopping or typing is all of the same matter – mindfulness and gratitude.

Meditation still kicks my ass

I never expected it to be easy (mentally or physically) but I did expect it to ease up a bit after a few years of practice. But here we are, still aching and working through each session; every day at home and every weekend at the zendo.

Each session humbles me and makes me take a few steps back. Before I get cocky, I get a sense of humor. I laugh when my legs fall asleep during a zazen session forcing me to stumble around and then only to settle back down to another session with a case of pins and needles that would bring Zeus to tears. I get to laugh when I have horrible gas during a group sitting or mess up the chants horribly (I will hit samadhi when I can pronounce Avalokitsvhara in front of a group of people). I laughed when I set my hair on fire while opening the altar (as did everyone else).

Basically, it’s still hard.  I don’t float on clouds when I mediate.  Nor am I light as a feather.  Nor do I become as gentle as a stream.  I don’t escape anything when I sit.  I sit to engage it.  It brings up some bad shit but I would rather see it and engage it than ignore it and place my head in the sand.

This is why I still see meditation as necessary to my ongoing practice and not as something to master.

Dharma Gates are Endless and full of sharp spiky things

I should end this with the biggest surprise of Zen practice – It isn’t all pretty. This is hard work and it brought up plenty of negative stuff to the surface. Like placing alcohol on a zit, it brings up the gross stuff. I have to deal with aspects of my personality that are still present.  That is the most painful part. I am working on the small things now during my practice and in time I’ll bang out some of the bigger ones. But in this moment and in this life I attend to those things that hang out in front of me.

Sometimes I think that I focus on the mundane too much and that it is denigrating my practice but then as I was sitting one day my daughter came in, sat on my lap, snuggled in and sat quietly with me for a moment. At that point, I realized that sitting did affect all sentient beings…little by little and bit by bit…the most surprise aspect of Zen.

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• Buddhist Leader Says Playing Video Games Lets Out Aggression; Better Method Than Meditation (techdirt.com)

I am incredibly pleased to announce the Hear & Now Project – a radically innovative initiative from the nice people at 21awake (aka me)

Here is a video which explains the basic idea:

To keep up to date, please keep an eye on the dedicated site www.thehearandnowproject.com as the project rapidly develops or follow @hearnowproject on twitter.

And if you’d like to sign up to be part of the testing community, please tell us here.

Exciting stuff methinks.

In my previous post I talked about my nascent exploration of relational practice and here I’d like to continue this thread and share some of my thinking about where this fits into a full modern life dedicated to awakening and its expression.

Having previously decided to dedicate 2010 to some intensive practice and then – lo and behold –  Aphrodite playing one of her most beautiful cosmic jokes, I’ve had my plans for next year wiped clean like an Etch-A-Sketch.  And while I’m certainly not as foolish or hubristic as to want to design the specifics of my next year, I am exploring what is the framework that allows me to line up all the elements of my life in support of my ambitions re: awakening and living a vibrant and engaged life.

And I think the answer looks a little something like:

The Whole-y Life: notes on a diagram

• There are three general domains for practice – here I call them me, my social networks and my society.  This classification is a nod to Ken Wilber’s I/We/It classification of his integral framework

• What is different about my current relationship to previous ones is that I have a much stronger understanding of my practice and therefore can open my arms and include my relational domain as an act of inclusion.  Previously it would have been more an exclusion as I had a more binary view of how awakening practice related to relationship as a hangover from the monastically-biased Theravadan inheritance.  It’s worth noting here that this is more an attitudinal thing rather than something that affected my behaviour.

• So a mature engaged practice seems to be one of unfolding and inclusion – at each point including more of your life into its embrace, just as you include more of your experience into your awareness – the symmetry really is remarkable

• And at each of these levels – individual, relational, societal the core practice looks slightly different.  Classical inner meditative work is best for the Me domain but not so for the Relational domain – that requires a practice that is more formless and – by definition – more social.  And in the Societal domain, we’re looking at how our livelihood can be dedicated to service based on our core values, so that there is no dissonance between our work and the rest of our lives

• But remember that the movement outwards has to be from a position of strength.  It is just as limiting to practice exclusively in the relational domain or service domain as it is to just be internally focussed.  That is why the arrow of awakening runs through all three layers.

• Therefore by inference, a strong meditation practice I believe will always be the kernel of this game.  I can see the value of this model when I think about friends of mine who are activists – very strong in the service/societal domain but less literate in the inner or relational domain resulting in the anger that motivates their often excellent work to leak into the more intimate areas of their lives

• I’ve quite deliberately chosen to use My Social Networks as the label for the area of our lives that can be used for relational practice.  This is sufficiently broad so as to include our romantic partners, our practice communities, our family, our friends…even our Twitter followers

• So from a very practical standpoint, I am currently using this framework to see where the gaps are in my own life so that I can exercise all three domains to their symphonic potential

• These I have identified as the following:
  • deepening and dedicating more time to my formal meditation practice
  • learning more about relational practice and including my partner in that ongoing exploration
  • re-framing my work towards service which includes exploring ways outside of this blog in which I can share my limited understanding and indeed make some part of my living through it
• Deepening my traditional meditative practice is particularly interesting since not only is it motivated by my spiritual urgency, it is also due to my recognition that if I am to truly grow my practice into the relational domain then that requires a really strong inner base

I hope this has been useful – it has been for me.

However I recognise that it may not be tremendously articulate so I hope to continue to edit this post as my understanding of this framework develops.

Thank you.

Earlier this year I talked about my intention to dedicate next year to formal practice.  And while my motivation and my urgency has not wavered, my life circumstances have done in that I have entered into a wonderful relationship with a wonderful lady.  And while I could still go along with Plan A and do the solo meditator thing, I know that it would not be the most skillful response to my life as it is right now.

All this has made me ask two big questions:

1. How can I serve my commitment to awakening while honouring the importance of my relationship?
2. What the hell am I going to do next year?

This blog post shows some of my working as I begin to answer them both.  But first…a silly diagram:

My limited views revealed and a new domain opens up.  Just by the asking question 1 about how to serve both my practice commitment together with my relationship I have realised that I was carrying around a view that a practice whose centre of gravity is in the solo-meditator-in-a-cave/retreat based model was intrinsically better than a practice where relationship played a central role.  While I had often talked the talk about relationship-as-practice, I noticed that this was actually often little more than lip service.  And this was really quite shocking to me.

Thankfully the reason I noticed this was an overwhelmingly positive one.  Given that my practice is stronger than the last time I was in a relationship I noticed something very important – that the specific qualities that vipassana practice develop can be cultivated just as well (if not better) through interaction – as long as you are being quite explicit and intentional about it.

Puppy paññā.  A silly (but real) example: I have little experience with pets and so when walking a friend’s dog Omar recently I noticed how my expectations of what a simple walk round the block would be like was really rather different as to the realities of how my fluffy little charge circumambulated his urban patch.

At the time I was mostly working with the practice of surrender in my formal meditation – examining the gap between experience as it was happening and my sense of observer.  And yes, while this was on a quite subtle level in formal practice the revelation to me while walking with Omar the dog was that this was exactly the same quality that I could develop in my relationship to him – just in a more gross domain.

This may sound obvious to many of you but it was quite a big deal for me.  For while subtle is more subtle than gross – what I realised was that I was holding the view that subtle is better than gross.  And it’s not…it’s just different subtler.  Develop the quality of surrender in whatever domain you care to and when you have created the conditions for working at a very subtle level of mind, then you’re all set.

Shining light on my blind spots.  Through my blog, someone got in touch with me recently who had just spent almost a decade in monastic communities in the UK and abroad and eager to hear his experiences, we met for dinner.  When I told him of my intention to spend much of 2010 dedicated to intensive practice he gave me a piece of advice which I did not fully understand at the time.  ”Don’t try and create the ideal conditions for your self – put yourself in community”.

I’ve now begun to understand his advice, for while working internally for a long time can do a lot of good work, it can often avoid some significant blind spots.  And especially in my case where the solo practitioner move is very much my comfort zone – I realise now that the most fruitful material to work with is to be found with other people.  Greg Kramer the founder of Insight Dialogue summarises this well when he says that so much of our suffering is relational but we try to come to its end through intra-personal not inter-personal practices.

Joy as the lubricant for awakening.  But of course  relationships aren’t all bad news!  First and foremost there is love.  I am not with my girlthing because I intend to use her as a foil in my ongoing adventures to awakening, I am with her because of my attraction, respect and care for her.  Joy or piti is one of the classical factors of awakening and when we are practising in a relational context it is no different.  Without this basis, relational practice can be hard work but with it, it can sing.  And for it to really sing, all parties should have some awareness that the relationship is being used in that way and for that purpose – this can bring a wonderful amplification effect to the vitality and investigation and indeed the awakening.

Moving past inherited monastic models.  In the Theravada tradition, the dominance of the monastic emphasis has meant that the domains of work, sex and money have largely been divorced from the practice of awakening.  For in the times of the Buddha, it was simply not possible to lead a householder life and have leisure time to dedicate to study and practice, so awakening practices were pretty much exclusively taught to the professional renunciates (see the Anathapindaka Sutta for – what I think is – a rather shocking example of this)

But this is not the world in which we live today so let’s not pretend that it is.  So for a genuine culture of awakening to flourish we have to look to extract the best of what the tradition has to offer and embed that into the realities of our lives and our societies.  This is exciting stuff and it’s new stuff – for its our generation that is working all this out.  A small group of us in London are particularly interested in this area and together with the teacher Martin Aylward are running course on this very topic in March 2010 called Work Sex Money Dharma…visit the site to find out more. (The WSMD site is in ongoing development at this stage so I will do a separate post announcing all the details when they are available).

My I have gone on rather a lot here haven’t I?

If you can bear it, in my next post I’ll talk a bit more about how I’m personally approaching my practice given my understanding of all the above.

The dramatic growth of online social networks  in the last five years such as Facebook and Twitter has led to social network theory – hitherto mainly the domain of fusty social anthropologists – to be of central interest to a new geeky generation.

So whether you’re in a start-up trying to launch the next big thing or perhaps just an little looker-on like me – exploring how networks form, why they form, and what happens when that connectivity is turned to action has never been more popular.  Nor indeed more important.

In my own exploration of this subject, it’s the concept of social objects that I have found most interesting.  And cutting to the chase and avoiding any network theory wanky-ness – a social object is the reason that two people speak to each other.

Traditionally social objects have been location-based such as the pub or the post office, but now of course communities can  now connect through digital objects; and it’s my opinion that the best Dhamma-related  social objects bar none are the weekly podcasts produced by Buddhist Geeks.

As a 29 year old practitioner, I have tremendous gratitude for Buddhist Geeks.  Yes, the podcasts are excellent in their own right, but the real magic happens when you engage through the conversations and communities that sit around them – of which this blog is certainly one.

A couple of small examples:

• Just a couple of days ago I had the extraordinary pleasure of meeting up for a drink with Alan Chapman – whom I had only heard of through his Buddhist Geeks podcast.  Now settling back in London he plans to set up a new group to share his understanding of awakening – a super-exciting idea which I look forward to being a part of.
• And the other way around…Martin Aylward is one of my favourite teachers who has been working with the sitting group that I co-host.  He has recently recorded a BGeeks interview which means that his fresh take on urban practice and freestyle awakening can be shared with a wider audience – good news indeed.

And most amazing of all, Vince Horn et al have been producing such high quality work with very limited resources.  Now that they have demonstrated their position at the heart of a distributed sangha they are rightly looking to grow their ambition and move into producing a regular digital magazine and a ground-breaking annual conference.

But to do so they need our further support and are inviting us to join them as investors and patrons.  The good news is that they have already gathered hundreds of supporters but they need we need that little bit more to take them to the level.  The level that matches their refreshing ambition.

So if you’ve gained value from their work… why not?

…are you?!

There is a quiet crisis in the insight meditation scene.  But since we’re all so awfully polite I have a concern that it’s not enough of a public conversation and one which boils down to this simple sentence: free is not sustainable.

The Buddha said that all of his teachings were of one taste, that of sweet sweet freedom.  And in the mendicant monastic tradition that he found himself in in ancient India and in and that he propagated through the Vinaya – the business model through which that teaching was expressed and thought was quite simple – the Dhamma was spread for free and was – and remains to be – heavily dependent on financial donations and the in-kind generosity of lay supporters.

So with one foot in an agrarian subsistence economy of pre-Asokhan India, let’s fast forward the best part of three millennia and we place our other foot into the capitalist market economy of the twenty-first century Western world and somehow expect the business model to still be valid.  I wonder…

This business model may still thrive in the modern monastic traditions such as the Amaravati stable due to it being sufficiently inspiring – where supporting this infrastructure allows a rich ex-patriate Asian supporter base to connect back to this beautiful, romantic and transformative tradition.  But what of the new breed – the Western lay teachers?

As Western lay practitioners we have inherited this noble practice of offering teachings freely as part of the package and my view – which many no doubt share – is that we live in different times.  And especially in Europe where donation culture is tiny in comparison to North America – the word we must be shouting from the roof-tops with regards the transmission of the teachings of our times is not that they should be free, but that they should be sustainable.

And that may well mean business models which are a little more flexible than the costs-only, teachers-dependent-on-donation model.  If the Dhamma is so valuable, and some of our best teachers are lay people – then it’s my personal opinion that they should be full time teachers – as a monastic is – but with a model that matches the economic realities of their lives.

I spend much of my day job working with arts & cultural organisations in the UK which historically – due to a dependency on state-led grant finance – and therefore find themselves in a similar situation.  But this type of money is now exceedingly scarce so organisations are having to be get cleverer.  This either means redefining themselves within a wider context – typically the social sector or creative industries rather than the cultural sector, or looking to move past grant finance and adopt more commercial forms of finance where appropriate.  I think there’s a very rich comparison to be made between the arts and the meditation scene re: organisational sustainability and I look forward to getting into that a little more soon.

But for now,  I know that many people are uncomfortable with even the talk of business models in a spiritual context.  But I make no apologies and instead point steadfastly to this idea of sustainability as the key metric, not cost to access.

There is a cultural problem in Dharmic circles in relationship to money – with many seeing it as impure – again I’d argue a pathological aspect of our monastic heritage.  This issue was well explored in Diana Winston’s most recent Buddhist Geeks interview and it’s exactly analogous to the issues faced in any mission-led organisation – spiritual, cultural or social enterprise.

My ongoing experience with working with all of these types of organisation is that we just have to see money as another currency rather than as a pathology – and have economic value as important as spiritual, artistic or social value.  Otherwise we’ll just fail the sustainability test and it’ll have happened on our watch.

Leading marketing expert Seth Godin recently spoke to this issue rather elegantly in his post The problem with non – where he speaks of the ways ingrained mindsets are holding back non-profit organisations from undergoing the changes they need to survive and I think much of this is spot on for us too.

And the reason that this is on my mind is that I am exploring what a 21st century spiritual enterprise looks like –  a business which generates as much spiritual value as it does economic value.  It’s a question that I find so tremendously exciting, and I know the challenge will be ensuring that authentic transformative Dhamma remains at its core.

More anon no doubt.

Many of you will know or have heard of Thanissara and Kittisaro, two former monastics in the Ajahn Chah/Sumedho tradition who now teach as senior teachers within the lay insight meditation tradition.  But what you might not know about them is that they as well as highly gifted practitioners and teachers they are prodigiously active in community projects in their adopted home of South Africa.

Following the success of the Woza Moya programme which is now an example of best practice in rural community support, their latest outreach initiative is The Khuphuka Project – a pioneering HIV/AIDS initiative in Kwa Zulu-Natal, a very rural area of South Africa.  And London Insight, the practice community here in London which I am most aligned to has decided to raise as much money as it can to help towards the £50,000 needed to build a community outreach centre, staffed by local people, and from which its many services will be coordinated.

This rural community faces huge problems including high HIV infection rates, high levels of unemployment, many orphans and ‘at risk’ children and associated poverty.

So should you feel moved to donate even a small amount, it would be so very appreciated.  And you can do so via my justgiving fundraising page.

If you are UK-based and are a tax-payer please do remember that you can claim Gift Aid to increase the value of your donation at no extra cost to yourself. And also since the project is South Africa-based, the money is collected via The Mandala Trust, a UK-based NGO, a trustee of which is the project director of the Khupuka Project.  More details about the Trust can be found here

Thank you!  I’ll let you know how I get on.

It’s no secret that I think that Rodney Smith is one of the finest teachers out there and his emphasis on urban-first rather than retreat-practice -is one I hugely appreciate.

So when one of the lovely people at his community Seattle Insight asked me to look at their new site before it was released I got a little bit overexcited.

seattleinsight.org is now fully live and it’s a lovely redesign.  And the feature that most catches the eye is that now most of Rodney’s talks are available in video which gives his remarkable teaching style that additional dimension.  So do please have an explore and enjoy this site which I consider as one of the most valuable online resources in the insight meditation scene.

PS and yes, for the eagle-eyed of you out there, I use Google Chrome…deal with it!