Ratnavandana introduces and guides us through a composite practice of all four Brahma Viharas at once - loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity.
She sets the scene perfectly with an introduction to the notion of cultivation/development within the context of a Buddhist spiritual life, showing how each of these qualities may be called forth whenever needed in the face of our experience, just as the flower is called forth from the seed in springtime.
A selection of beautiful lead-ins to meditation from Day 7 of the Rainy Season Retreat from Spring 2015 which took place in Bristol and around the world online!
Rounding off day 6 of Living In The Mandala we have another puja that steers to the deep when it comes to evoking the guardian Buddha of the moment, in this case Ratnasambhava - the Jewel-Born, archetypal Buddha of abundance, spiritual riches and the South…
Continuing the series of personal talks on each of the Brahma Viharas from the 2015 Rainy Season Retreat, Ratnavandana shares an intensely honest, psychologically intimate, beautifully forensic history of her personal relationship to the practice of upekkha (equanimity) throughout her spiritual life. We hear about ways to assess what’s going on in the subtler realms of our experience - and how to look to move beyond them so we too can live like a river…
It’s on account of equanimity, in its ultimate sense, that you’re balanced - even with regard to Samsara and Nirvana, even those two extremes don’t disturb you. Subject and Object are, the same - or not different, so far as you’re concerned. You are in a state of absolute equanimity or, as I have said elsewhere, you are in a state of axiality and centrality. You have reached what the Chinese mystics call ‘the unwobbling pivot of existence’. As the Mangala sutta says ‘you are one whose mind does not shake when touched by the eight Loka Dhammas.
Do you know what I mean by axiality? You feel as though you are the axis upon which everything turns though not in an egoistic sense. You are absolutely stable and unshakable, immovable, though at the same time you’re extremely mobile, even dancing all over the place. You don’t need to have your centre fixed in any particular spot. Your centre is everywhere.
