Dear Friends,<\/p>\n
I’m on retreat until Tuesday afternoon, but I’ve queued up some emails to keep you inspired while I’m away.<\/em><\/p>\n Today and tomorrow will be brief… I think there is plenty of material, especially from Friday and Saturday, to keep you engaged!<\/p>\n Chapter 13 in\u00a0The Four Foundations of Mindfulness in Plain English<\/em> visit the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. I’ll give a quick summary of the four truths today.<\/p>\n The four truths are statements about how life is. You don’t have to take these as dogma – instead, turn your mindfulness to investigate your own experience, and see how they measure up.<\/p>\n The first truth acknowledges that there is suffering in life. “Suffering” is a heavy word. Some teachers use “stress” or “dissatisfaction” or words like that. The Pali word is\u00a0dukkha<\/em>, and I’ve heard it describes that feeling when you’re riding in a cart where the axle doesn’t quite fit the wheel.<\/p>\n The second truth says that there is a cause to the suffering we feel, which is craving – we want a sunny day, the new iPhone, a promotion, … always wanting something more.<\/p>\n The third truth says there is the possibility for the cessation of this suffering from craving. We feel it in some moments in our day to day lives – that momentary release – that “ahhh”. We can start to pay attention to when that happens and appreciate it when that happens, and realize that the possibility exists on a larger scale.<\/p>\n The fourth truth says there is a way of cultivating conditions to have cessation… the eightfold path, which we’ll visit tomorrow.<\/p>\n Today, you can turn your mindful investigation into these four truths and see what you notice in your own experience.<\/p>\n Best wishes, Dear Friends, I’m on retreat until Tuesday afternoon, but I’ve queued up some emails to keep you inspired while I’m away. Today and tomorrow will be brief… I think there is plenty of material, especially from Friday and Saturday, to keep you engaged! Chapter 13 in\u00a0The Four Foundations of Mindfulness in Plain English visit the Four Noble Truths\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[102],"tags":[160,146,103],"class_list":["post-394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jan-2018","tag-four-noble-truths","tag-fourth-foundation","tag-henepola-gunaratana"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":395,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions\/395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAndrea<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"