Focus on Feeling -Monastic Daylong August 16, 2015

Focus on Feeling -Monastic Daylong

August 16, 2015 Sunday from 9:00 am to 430 pm

It is at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center at 388 9th Street,Oakland, Ca. 94607
Register through Eventbrite at their site http://oacc.cc/

The teachings will be offered freely by Ayya Sobhana so attendance is by

donation.

Feeling — Vedana in the Pali language of early Buddhism — is the point where our emotional process becomes accessible to the conscious mind.  We learn from the Buddha’s teaching to see feeling as the trigger for craving, and also one of the easiest points where we can interrupt the cycle of craving, clinging and suffering. But how to get free from craving without an unhealthy detachment from our inner life?

In this daylong retreat we will aim to more fully know and experience feelings. We will appreciate what feeling is good for, how feeling helps us to focus, to decide, and to intuitively look after our own welfare and the welfare of who we care about.  We will make friends with emotional reaction, but from a wisdom point of view so there is lightness, balance and a sense of freedom whether the emotions are pleasurable or afflictive.

This retreat will continue Ayya Sobhana’s investigation of fundamental Dhamma in the light of modern neuroscience and new thinking about emotion. Informed by current ideas we can make the Dhamma less abstract, more meaningful and more helpful at any level of spiritual practice. Informed by the Dhamma, our psychological approach can be more powerful, directed beyond therapy to a fundamental transformation of the mind and heart … to awakening.  

Ayya Sobhana is the Prioress of Aranya Bodhi, a new community for monastic women located on the Sonoma Coast of California. Together with Ayya Tathaaloka Theri, Ayya Sobhana has been deeply involved int the recent restoration of Bhikkhuni full ordination in the Theravada tradition. She meditated and trained with Bhante Henepola Gunaratana since 1989 and stayed at the Bhavana Society in West Virginia from 2003 to 2010. She ordained in 2003 and obtained full Bhikkhuni ordination in 2006. Her primary practice is the Eightfold Noble Path, that is, integration of meditation with ethical living and compassionate relationships for the sake of liberation.