Phra Uttara, the meditation teacher at Wat Umong, will be presenting a special dharma talk and meditation practice this coming Monday morning, May 28th at 9 am at Wat Umong.  It will be approximately two hours.  For those of you who had the opportunity to attend Phra Uttara’s dharma talk for our May 24th session, you know that Phra Uttara’s presentations are warmly humorous, and profoundly simple.  

Phra Uttara is a monk from Vietnam and has studied in Burma under U Tejaniya. He was the “meditation master” for the ten-day meditation course in English for the monks and novices studying at Mahachulalonkornrajavidyalaya Buddhist University in Chiang Mai. 

Wat Umong is a Buddhist oasis in the growing Chiang Mai metropolis. Tucked up against Doi Suthep, it is a temple in the Thai forest tradition.  Wat Umong has a close relationship with Wat Suan Mokh, the home of Buddhidasa, arguably the most famous and influential Thai monk of the twentieth century.  

I am very happy to announce that our good friend, Phra Uttara, will be giving a dharma talk “Watching the Mind” this coming Thursday, May 24th at Yoga Tree at 7:30 pm.

Phra Uttara is the meditation teacher at Wat Umong.  Phra Uttara has an interesting background.  He was a monk in the Pure Land tradition in Vietnam and then traveled to Burma to study with Sayadaw U Tejaniya for two years.  Fluent in English, Phra Uttara brings his joy and humor to his dharma talk.

http://sayadawutejaniya.org/

Earth Breathing, Breathing Earth

2-6 May 2012 
with Jon Jandai & Vichak Panich

Opportunity to learn meditation techniques, Buddhist teachings and practices with an experienced instructor. This five-day retreat brings together the state of embodiment in meditation practice and daily activities in a mindfulness-based recovery community.

Participants receive extensive instruction in mindfulness-awareness (shamatha – vispashyana), as well as bodywork techniques, opening, stabilizing and extending awareness according to the Tibetan Buddhist teachings. With Jon Jandai, participants are introduced to knowledge of self-reliant living including introduction to natural building, organic gardening, natural health and product making.

1. Extensive exploration of the body, breath, and all emotional states.
2. Coming back to the healing energy of the earth.
3. Daily talks on the essential teachings of the practice lineage
4. Intensive periods of silence interspersed with discussion and group exploration.
5. Working on the land, making bricks, working in the garden, and getting sweat.
6. Synchronizing body and mind, earth and heaven.

Workshop in English with no Thai translation

Limit to only 20 participants
To register please email dare.to.retreat@gmail.com

Fee 5,500 Baht (includes food and lodging)
If you’re a volunteer at New Life Foundation, fee is 3,500 Baht

Organized by Pun Pun Organic Farm, Tilopa House and New Life Foundation

Panyaden School (bilingual Buddhist school in Hang Dong) is pleased to announce a Dhamma Talk (in English and Thai) by Phra Ajahn Jiew, a forest monk and a former student of our school’s spiritual advisor, Taan Ajahn Jayasaro, on Tuesday, 6 Mar 2012 at 4pm. We would like to cordially invite you, your friends, devotees and practitioners to join us on this day. A question and answer will follow the talk if there is enough time.

Where: Panyaden School, 218 Moo 2, T.Namprae, A.Hang Dong, Chiang Mai

Time: 4-5pm

Contact: info@panyaden.ac.th  or  tel: 053-426618 / 080 078 5115

All are welcome. A map is attached for your easy reference. We hope that you will be able to join us. Thank you for your time and attention!

Yours sincerely
Li Li
for Panyaden School
http://www.panyaden.ac.th

Mindful Eating and Fast-Food Buddhism

This is an article from The Atlantic by Robert Wright, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Evolution of God.

“Mindful eating” has officially entered the memosphere. An article about it reached the very top of The New York Timesmost-emailed list this week, and two days later it’s still hanging in there at number three.

What is mindful eating? The Times piece gives step-by-step instructions. “Chew slowly. Stop talking. Tune in to the texture of the pasta, the flavor of the cheese, the bright color of the sauce in the bowl, the aroma of the rising steam.”

And what is the point of the exercise? For one thing, it’s a kind of fast-food form of Buddhism. If you don’t have time to go off to a monastery and sit in silence for a week, you can still get little tastes, here and there, of what such a retreat might be like.

And when I say little tastes, I mean little tastes. The Times story says of Jan Chozen Bays, a pediatrician and meditation teacher:

Sometimes, even she is too busy to contemplate a chickpea. So there are days when Dr. Bays will take three mindful sips of tea, “and then, O.K., I’ve got to go do my work,” she said. “Anybody can do that. Anywhere.”

Even scarfing down a burrito in the car offers an opportunity for insight. “Mindful eating includes mindless eating,” she said. ” ‘I am aware that I am eating and driving.’ “

It may sound like I’m about to make fun of the mindful eating movement–and that last quote is certainly a tempting springboard–but instead I’m going to spring to its defense. First, though, I have to disclose something about myself.

Three times over the last nine years I’ve gone on one-week silent meditation retreats at a Buddhist retreat center. Seven days of no talking, no reading, no phone calls, no email, no news whatsoever from the outside world. Five and a half hours of sitting meditation each day, five and a half hours of walking walking meditation each day. And, more to the point, three meals a day.

But the term “meals” doesn’t do justice to these experiences. When I got to my first meditation retreat, I didn’t understand why so many people in the dining hall were eating with their eyes closed. Three days later I was just like them–eyes closed, eating in slow motion, totally absorbed in the taste and texture of foods that, a few days earlier, I would have dismissed as offputtingly wholesome and lacking in sex appeal. (None of the food was even made of dead animals!)

Now that I’ve established my credentials, I just want to make two points:

(1) If you dabble in mindful eating as prescribed in the Times piece, do not be under the mistaken impression that this is anything like the real thing. The level of sensual emergence in food that I reached would not have been possible without getting totally off the grid and using intense meditation to fundamentally alter my frame of mind.

(2) Do not be under the impression that this sensual indulgence is the ultimate point of the exercise. Because meditation can involve a lot of inward focus, it is sometimes belittled as egotistical or solipsistic. But the overall effect is supposed to be roughly the opposite, and that held true for me. The retreats made me way more open to other people and less judgmental of them. I felt a true kinship even with non-human animals (even non-canine non-human animals!). That this was intertwined with a much deeper sense of aesthetic appreciation–of both food and non-food items–certainly made the whole experience gratifying, but it was a paradoxically selfless kind of gratification.

The transforming effect that a silent meditation retreat can have doesn’t magically last forever, though you can hang on to an appreciable part of it if you practice daily meditation and mindfulness in a disciplined fashion after the retreat is over (which is way easier said than done). So I’m not the wonderful human being I so briefly was at the end of my first meditation retreat. But I think I’m better than I was before I went on it (leaving aside the question of how high that’s setting the bar).

The Green Papaya Sangha happily welcomes back an old and dear friend, Phra Pandit Bhikku.  He will be joining us his Thursday, February 16 at 7:30 pm at the yoga Tree.  He will be speaking on;

The Lion’s Roar:  The incontrovertible teaching: developing meditation that goes beyond everything.  

Phra Pandit is a British monk resident in Bangkok and has been ordained as a Bhikkhu (monk) in Thailand since 1996. Apart from Dhamma and meditation,his  interests include psychology (BA) and faerie tales. Blogmaster at littlebang.org, Phra Pandit organizes most LittleBang events, and is the speaker at the annual Dhamma Talk Series. Phra Pandit is a lecturer at Mahachulalongkorn Rajavidiylaya University at the main campus in Bangkok, a Buddhist university for monks and novices.