Jesse Vega is a young teacher with a long mane of hair pulled back and beautiful blue eyes. Wise and well-educated in the Burmese Buddhist scriptures, Saturday December 19th the shortest day of the year, he led an all-day sit-walk and dharma talk retreat with a break for lunch. It was an awesome quiet circle.
A) Opening.
Super-spacious opening for me. In a guided meditation, Jesse asked us to
"Feel the space around your left knee."
There is so much space around every part of our bodies if we just allow and explore it! Altered state.
B) Two Themes(compressed from memory):
1) Q: What if my practice is boring?
A: Well, we're so drawn-in now by(the tethering of ourselves to family & work calls & email combined with texts) always being able to be entertained the moment we lose interest in what's around us....that we have to ask ourselves(as I understood this), And be curious. Let's focus:
"What is the nature of my relationship to neutral experience?"
I can explore and inhabit it and invariably it shifts.
2) Q: Am I supposed to laser-focus or am I supposed to be mindfully aware(with the intent of "loving awareness" as Ram Dass calls it. Jesse is in the Burmese tradition of Metta and The Brahmahivaras and Ram Dass learned from Neem Karoli Baba-whom Steve Jobs later visited!- Both are Vipassana)?"
A: "In every Buddhist religion, all sects address in some proportion, the balance of zen-like focus and also the intention to love, have open awareness of all sounds, visuals, visions, with compassionate non-judgment."
This was news to me as I had been in an argument with another Animal Communicator over which was better(Yikes!) but it turns out that this is a huge age-old debate(and even within Zen there are the Rinzai(sudden awakening) and Soto(sit and sit and sit) schools and I liked The First Zen Institute(now closed) of New York because it was a mix of the 2).
C) Enticement to Practice. Sensory manipulation and deprivation, Jesse admitted, do bring the siddhis or super-normal powers, but as Ram Dass(Richard Alpert) has said, ~"the powers are interesting but they are not the essence. The essence is love." Jesse Vega believes that if one becomes too powerful, as in the case of Burmese guru Dipa Ma, it was just so awesome that she had a very difficult time separating out the fact that our powers do not accrete to our Ego-mind/body but happen through us.
I think extraordinary phenomena do happen at first more easily in pairs and groups, because of the agreed-upon intention to show up and practice, but also from the love and human warmth.
D) Holism: On Not Rejecting the darkness of Winter and Night(again compressed):
Christmas is a time where we band together against the cold and we put up lights. It's awesome(!) but we must also remember All that we have to learn from the darkness.
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There are many good teachers, facilitators, volunteers and practitioners at Insight Meditation of Pioneer Valley, sits on Monday at 5:30p- and Wednesday at 7:00 p is 1/2 hour sit plus dharma talk + IPV has lots of 1-2 day weekends.
Twitter: @insightpv