Judy Lief

Buddhism – Shambhala – Profound Treasury – Making Friends with Death

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Blog 58: Don’t Be Frivolous.

April 28, 2015 By Judy Lief

58. Don’t be frivolous.
To work with this slogan, it is necessary to look at how you spend your time, what you think about, and how your invest your energy. It is easy to fritter away your time in frivolous pursuits that do not lead anywhere. But living in this way is like eating junk food: it is ultimately unsatisfying.

Frivolity comes across as light-hearted and innocent, but it is not. It is not real openness, but a form of aggression towards your own buddha nature. Keeping things on the surface level helps you prevent any discovery arising that might rock the boat. It is seemingly more comfortable to float about in the shallows of life than to pursue its depths. But since the power of buddha nature is that it keeps wanting to arise, suppressing that instinct takes work. To maintain your narrow field of comfort, you have to keep pushing it down.

It is tricky to work with frivolity. First, it is easy to confuse it with the kind of openness, light-heartedness and playful childlike mind that is cultivated by meditative practice. Frivolity can seem to be a virtue, but it isn’t. Second, it is possible to overcorrect, to counter frivolity with an overblown display of seriousness. But the mind/heart cultivated by mind training is neither stodgy nor frivolous. The idea is to avoid both those extremes.

You could say that the play between seriousness and frivolity is a kind of Buddhist humor. The most solemn occasions have an undercurrent of absurdity; and the silliest interactions have an undertone of profundity.

Today’s practice

Do a little census of what you think about and how you spend your time. How do you distinguish between what it frivolous and what is worthwhile?

Upcoming Events: Profound Treasury Retreat

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8th Annual PROFOUND TREASURY RETREAT at Saco, Maine 

June 12-24 at Ferry Beach Conference Center, Saco, Maine

 

Living Dharma: The Joy and Challenge of Joining Practice and Action

 

 

“Mindfulness practice is not just about what is happening to you individually and personally—it is about how much you are going to transmit your sanity and your insanity to the rest of the world.”—Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

 

“If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”  Charlie Parker

 

Living Dharma

The Joy and Challenge of Joining Practice and Action

 

In these times of turmoil, it’s important to reflect on ways to bring our lifestyle and our actions into greater accord with the dharma.   If your life does not reflect your practice, what is the point of meditation and study?

 

The time spent in sitting meditation is much less than the time spent going about our everyday lives. Therefore, postmeditation practice is essential. The combination of meditation and postmeditation makes our practice complete—running through our entire life rather than something we turn on and off.

 

In this class, we will focus on the challenges of living a dharmic life, and how they are addressed in the three stages of the Tibetan Buddhist path.  We will work with the foundational or hinayana guidelines for living life with simplicity and contentment. We will study mahayana teachings on how to activate compassion and benefit others. Finally, we will explore vajrayana teachings on how to engage more freshly and spontaneously by cutting hesitation and fixed views.

 

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Topics include:

The three essentials: discipline, meditation, and wisdom

Refraining from harm: working with the five precepts

Being of benefit: practicing the paramitas

Overcoming hesitation: engaging with the four karmas

Obstacles, mistakes, and fresh starts

 

From Judy’s Blog

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Judy Lief • 802-598-5832 • judy@judylief.com