Leela Sarti has been a student of the Buddha's teachings and practices since she was 16 years old. She lives with her family in Sweden and in addition to teaching Insight Meditation retreats internationally works individually with students in her psychotherapy practice in Stockholm. She is a long term student of the Diamond Approach and part of a teacher training program in that tradition.
The gut is sometimes referred to as the second brain. It takes guts to live and practice in this beautiful, sweet, terrible and messy existence. The more we turn to life, open to life, the more our metabolisation of stored up past experiences accelerates. Full presence in belly, heart and head makes us more open to the Nothingness that is the deepest nature of reality. When we are natural in ourselves we know how to let go.
The heart is the territory of our being where things are made personal. It is also the place were our most difficult personal issues are located. The awakened heart is a natural expression real openess, warm acceptance and the joy of being. A fierce, beating heart is needed in order to skillfully meet and transform shame and self-judgement. The fierce heart puts gentle pressure on all our defenses and structures, and when we melt a little, into the the authenticity of our heart, we become nourished but less demanding of life. The natural curiosity and peaceful simplicity of the heart emerges.
The fragmentation of life has a chance of ending when we drop into embodied presence. When our awareness is immediate and intimate with experience we can disentangle ourselves from inner stories, commentaries, concepts, and contracted ideas. The most basic function of the personality is the reduction and the restriction of awareness, but through our own practice we free and expand awareness and learn that it can be a transformative experience to simply pause instead of immediatly filling up the space. When we are open to the immediacy of life, even when it is difficult, the heart responds with kindness, equanimity and joy.
The practice of embodied mindful meditation opens the possibility to understand and transform our habits of dissatisfaction and distraction, and invites spaciousness and openness in our day-to-day lives. Becoming intimate, moment by moment, with living reality expands our life-perspective and attunes us to what really matters in life. We can invite the practice of mind-heart-body fullness and the reorienting, and inclining of the mind towards the natural capacity for well-being, contentment, delight and kindness.
It is transforming to simply pause, sense and listen instead of immediately filling up the space. When we become sensitive and attuned to the neutral tone in life it can become an entry to the stillness of the ground of being. With the help of poetry and stories, unfabricated silence and the power of not knowing is invited into the practice space. An invitation to shift our weight, more profoundly than the mind can imagine, to the unfabricated, the unconditioned, the deathless.
Who am I beyond concepts and ideas about myself? What does it mean to experience myself as a medium of consciousness? What is it that needs to wake up and what goes through transformation? This evening talk inquires into how embodied presence allows experience to arise in a more complete and whole way. As our capacity to be clear and sensitive evolves we become more malleable in our being, more real in our understanding and capable to respond rather than react to life.
An exploration of how to truly land and relax into a retreat, and feel into the personal and universal truth of why we engage in the practice of Insight meditation.
To ask 'who am I?' is not a theoretical or esoteric question, but a practical question to ask in the midst of life. A steadiness of awareness makes it possible to trace the process of identity in relationship to body, mind, our belief, our roles, our situations in life and beyond any sense of self. When we are less identified we become more spacious and easy going. The radiant heart quality of equanimity - upekka - is essential when it comes to loosening fixed identity and living a life that embraces form and emptiness in a natural and authentic way.
