Sean Feit Oakes

Tag: Buddhism

  • The teaching of the 6 Realms as a metaphor for privilege

    The Buddhist cosmological framework of the “6 Realms” can be read both as a map of where beings go from lifetime to lifetime, and/or a map of the psychological-emotional-relational states we pass through in the course of this life. Both are valuable. Here’s a discussion of the map in relation to the social justice work…

  • The gratification, the danger, and the escape

    A classical teaching on why it’s so hard to let go, but why we must, if we want to find freedom from suffering. Talk given at Insight Meditation Satsang, Yoga Tree Telegraph.

  • After the Orlando nightclub attack

    Talk: Responding to the tragedy in Orlando. (6.16.16)

  • Chants: lokāḥ samastāḥ sukhino bhavantu

    We do this chant at the end of the Satsang meditation period. It’s an ancient mantra beloved in both the Buddhist and Hindu Yoga traditions, and translates roughly as: May all beings be at ease. OM, Peace, peace, peace. If you want to use it as a mantra to repeat, you could omit the “oṃ…

  • Mindfulness means intimacy

    Talk: Mindfulness as intimacy with ourselves, with the world through our senses, in relationship with each moment. Given at Vajrapani yoga and meditation retreat with Pete Guinosso. (10.2.15)

  • Yama and Mara: Hindu and Buddhist personifications of Death, a hypothesis

    Both Buddhism and Hinduism personify Death in the form of a deity. The two traditions’ imagination around this figure naturally has many overlaps, but I’m suddenly thinking about some that I can’t find any reference to in the scholarly literature. The correspondence is about the role of Death as Teacher, as appearing in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad,…

  • Saffron-washing part 2: Response to Thich Nhat Hanh

    Several folks have posted this Thich Nhat Hanh (TNH) interview to me, after my recent dip into the Google-Mindfulness-Buddhism-Capitalism debate following the Wisdom 2.0 protest. There’s a good debate about it on Be Scofield’s Facebook wall, and a smaller one on mine after this post, and I don’t need to repeat many of the elements…

  • Mindfulness the Google Way: well-intentioned saffron-washing?

    For the last few years there’s been a growing uproar in San Francisco rooted in dismay and anger over ballooning rents, historically high eviction rates, and other markers of the intense gentrification that has been happening for 15 years or so — if I choose the tech boom of the 90s as a convenient recent…

  • Inner and outer gaze in dharma and art practice

      I tell you that there is no making an end of suffering & stress without reaching the end of the cosmos. Yet it is just within this fathom-long body, with its perception & intellect, that I declare that there is the cosmos, the origination of the cosmos, the cessation of the cosmos, and the…

  • I let a song go out of my heart: an ear worm gets me thinking about karma

    This morning, walking up the steps of Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley, through the crisp fall air, I heard a fragment of melody, whistled, in the distance. I only heard a handful of notes, but recognized it as the distinctive dorian mode hook in “Eleanor Rigby” — the part where the words are “…picks up the…

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