Sean Feit Oakes

Category: trauma

  • At home in the heart: adoption, early attachment rupture, identity

    Talks and meditations from two daylong gatherings in 2019 and 2020 at East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, offered for adoptees, refugees, fostered, and other folks with early family system rupture. Both days were co-offered with Lev White, but Lev was unable to teach the 2020 one at the last minute, so I taught it…

  • “You Have to Burn Through It”: Remembering Robert Hall

    I first met Robert Hall in an interview room at Spirit Rock, during the February part of the 2-month retreat in 2000. I had just started practice there the previous summer, and this was my first long silent retreat. I had found my way to Insight Meditation the way lots of folks did, by stumbling…

  • Cultivating Home in Our Hearts: For Adult Adoptees, Fostered, & Child Welfare System Survivors

    This page houses the talks and meditations given by Sean Oakes and Lev White at our Nov 2, 2019 daylong workshop at East Bay Meditation Center. This class was for us who experienced separation from birth families at early ages to explore the heart of the Buddha’s teachings: that pain and loss are built into…

  • How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Break

    How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Break

    When I first started going to my teacher Eugene Cash’s meditation group at the Unitarian Church in San Francisco on Sunday nights, back in the late 90s, I did what a lot of enthusiastic young meditators do in groups like that: I skipped the break. Which is to say, after the silent meditation finished, I…

  • Mettā is a Prayer for World Peace

    A few days after the Pittsburgh Synagogue bombing by an anti-semitic white nationalist, we practice and discuss the radical communal prayer called mettā (Loving-kindness, benevolence, friendliness). How radiating mettā to All Beings, including the difficult ones, is the same as praying for world peace. Meditation: Breath, whole body, and radiating mettā to all beings (10.30.18)…

  • Toward an Enraged Buddhism, Part 1

    Reevaluating anger and rage on a week where writing about rage, and especially women’s rage at injustice, is hitting threshold in my community. A simple promo post for this talk initiated a lovely, spread out conversation with folks on FB, including Rebecca Solnit, who has written eloquently (as always) on this. There’s a bunch of…

  • Organic Intelligence basics for yoga & meditation practice

    Four talks on the basics of Organic Intelligence (OI) as it might be applied to yoga and meditation practice. These talks were given in the context of a “Trauma-Sensitive Yoga” weekend at Namaste (June 2018), and look at the building blocks of OI using the common practice of yoga class and posture work as the…

  • The Great Demons: Systemic trauma & social action

    Based in our recent exploration of the Diamond Sūtra and the ideal of the Bodhisattva, we begin a series of discussions of what I’ll call the Great Demons, the systemic ills we struggle with and which so clearly are conditions for global suffering right now. We’ll work with three core models for understanding systemic ill,…

  • Samadhi & Nervous System Health

    A talk I gave at Insight Meditation South Bay on samādhi in the context of the 7 Awakening Factors. After the cornerstone Factor, Mindfulness, this list is divided into 3 energizing Factors: Investigation of States, Energy, and Rapture; and 3 calming Factors: Tranquillity, Focus (samādhi), and Equanimity. If we read the list as a sequence…

  • Ditch your meditation timer (use it differently)

    If meditation is part of your daily home practice, you probably keep time in some way. Peeking at the clock every 30 seconds is clearly not the point, so you have to have some structure for sitting with your eyes closed, right? Either you set an alarm (crickets seems to be a favorite lately, if…

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