Against The Stream Noah Levine

There's a question about how do we ideally practice intimacy, sexuality, romance in the Dharma. Where there's all this emphasis on non attachment. How do we have love and non attachment?

How do we have sex and not cling is the topic tonight. We're going to talk about sex tonight, and I'll share some Buddhist perspectives.

Tonight we're going to talk about appreciation, appreciative joy, empathy, attunement and gratitude. May you be successful at freeing yourself from suffering. May you be successful at finding true happiness, true well being Not just material and sensual pleasures, but may you have some real healing, some real awakening. May your path lead to freedom. This is a practice of having that sort of attitude and encouragement and training our heart to feel it.

I think a simplified way to think about equanimity is “keeping your cool”. Similar to the loving kindness teaching “being at ease” no matter what's happening, not just when life is easy, but also when life is quite difficult. Maintaining a sense of equanimity, ease, cool, well being, understanding and accepting that pain is unavoidable. That we will all experience pain in our lives and try to meet that with compassion.

I'm going to talk about, and we'll meditate on, compassion tonight. Compassion is one of the qualities that is so rare for humans to have… true compassion for ourselves, for our own pain… true compassion for others, including not just our loved ones. There are certain people who are easier to have compassion for than others, but the practice is to actually have compassion for all living beings.

We just, we just did completed a 10 week series on the Buddha's teachings on mindfulness and the four foundations of mindfulness. We took two and a half months to go through that. I wanted to shift from the mindfulness based meditation instructions to heart practices. Practices around developing kindness and compassion and forgiveness and appreciation, generosity. So I think I'll spend the next few weeks doing meditations on that. I thought I'd start tonight with the kind of umbrella term of kindness, the importance of kindness and the practice of kindness.

We're at the final section of the teachings on mindfulness that I've been discussing over the last couple months. This section is about mindfulness of the Four Noble Truths. Turning our awareness towards our experience of suffering, the cause of suffering, those times where we're not suffering, the cessation, the end. Those moments throughout our lives where there's no suffering and the goal of living more and more into a life where we're not suffering about what's happening. And the eightfold path that leads to the end of suffering. So I'm going to share some of the traditional teachings about that.