Buddhist Recovery Network

Outside Issues and All Our Affairs: The Challenge of Integrating Social Activism in Our Spiritual Practice
2021-08-01 10:00 - 11:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | BRN Academy

Cabbages and Condoms
2021-07-04 10:00 - 11:00
Life is naturally difficult and disappointing. All living creatures are programmed to seek security and safety, and as humans, we also seek certainty. As a result, we often live life as unconscious prisoners of fear.

Fear of this world and of a next world, fear of sickness and of death, fear of insecurity and of being defenceless, fear of the unknown and of the unexpected. In short, fear of life itself.

In this month’s Academy talk, I hope to explore some links between fear and craving. I will offer some ideas, particularly using the Heart practices including forgiveness, for how we might meet life on life’s terms to live a compassionate, confident and fearless life.

Knowing I Am On The Dharma Path
2021-06-06 10:00 - 11:00

Changing Poison into Medicine
2021-05-02 10:00 - 11:00
Myokei Caine-Barrett currently holds the position of Bishop of the Nichiren Shu Buddhist Order of North America. She is the first woman and the first American to hold this position. She is also the first American woman and first person of African American-Japanese descent to be fully ordained, having completed this process in 2007 with Archbishop Nissho Uchino in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. She is the guiding teacher and resident priest at Myoken-ji Temple in Houston, Texas.

Myokei Shonin continues to volunteer with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice as clergy to two prison Sanghas for the past 16 years in keeping with the Lotus Sutra teaching of full equality of all beings. Her writings have been published in a variety of Buddhist magazines [Tricycle, Lion’s Roar] and newspapers [Nichiren Shu News] and is featured in “The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women.” She is currently developing curriculum for (1) the Nichiren Shu tradition and the Lotus Sutra and (2) dealing with the trauma of incarceration and racism.

Relax the Body, Relax the Mind
2021-04-04 10:00 - 11:00
Our bodies hold so much that we’re not aware of. Our shoulders are tight, our jaws are clenched. This tenseness is often a reaction to cravings, aversions, and other habits of mind that we’re also unaware of. In this meditation and talk, Mary will invite us to relax the body and mind which allows us to be with our thoughts and feelings as they arise and develop the ability to respond with clarity and compassion. This practice is helpful in dealing both with addiction and with moving through our day to day lives.

Showing Up for Life As It Is
2021-03-07 10:00 - 11:00
So much of our lives can be driven by unconscious reactivity: the endless struggle to avoid painful or negative feelings. With mindfulness meditation, we can develop the skill of patience and presence, so that we can experience calm and contentment even in the midst of all of the challenges of our lives.

Watch Your Tone: Awareness of Feeling Tones
2021-02-07 10:00 - 11:00
With any experience, there is a felt sense that arises within us before the onslaught of stories and emotions. It often happens so quickly that we are unaware of it. These feeling tones set in motion the habitual reactions of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that we get caught up in.

The Buddha taught us the cause of our suffering in the Second Noble Truth, mainly craving for things to be different than they are. Bringing awareness, our mindfulness, to the subtleties in feeling tones of experiences allows the space for us to see clearly how this plays out, and we then can expand our capacity to respond to experience as it is, rather than react.

Eight Step Recovery
2021-01-03 10:00 - 11:00
This months teaching will take the form of an Eight Step Recovery meeting

Moving into Spaciousness
2020-12-06 10:00 - 11:00
In this talk Mary will talk about identifying those constricted and frightened parts of ourselves that we may not even be aware of. When we’re caught in any type of addictive behavior, we’re also often trapped in habits of mind that are driven by fear and an inability to be with reality. When we hold on to our beliefs of the way things are supposed to be, or fight off the way things are, we’re often tense and cling tightly to our ideas. This practice offers us a way to recognize what this constriction feels like in our bodies and how to let go and make more space. As we release the “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts”, we can breathe more easily and allow ourselves to be more intimate with our experience. We learn to trust the what’s actually happening instead of what we think might happen. This moves us into the calm and ease that spaciousness allows.

Meditating during Uncertain Times
2020-11-01 10:00 - 11:00
With the American election coming up, and the spike in COVID cases around the world, it is inevitable that many people may be experiencing PTSD, panic attacks, worry and concern. Many people ask how can meditation help when all you are doing is sitting on the cushion? Don’t we have to get up, go outside and act? Yes we do. What we do off the cushions we bring onto the meditation cushion, and what we do on the meditation cushion we take back into the world. So come and join the President of BRN and explore meditation through a trauma informed lens, and surrender to some healing.
Award-winning author of 8 books, Valerie (Vimalasara) Mason-John is the co-founder of Mindfulness-Based Addiction Recovery MBAR, a secular recovery 8-week program, and the co-author and co-founder of Eight Step Recovery Using The Buddha’s Teachings to Overcome Addiction. She was the co-founder of Healing and Insight a teaching faculty embracing Buddhist Recovery in all its guises. She is now responsible for programming Buddhist Recovery Retreats at the Menla Retreat Centre in Upstate New York. Chair of Vancouver Buddhist Centre, she is a senior member of the Triratna Buddhist Order, and tours internationally as a public speaker and trainer in the field of addictions and emotional trauma.Website: www.valeriemason-john.com

Liberation Now: From the Progressive Path to Direct Experience
2020-10-04 10:00 - 11:00
In a progressive path approach to practice, we sometimes fall for the idea that liberation is in the future.

We are conditioned to believe that we must end thinking, master practices, meditate for years, and purify our minds. Without realizing it, our beliefs maintain the conditioning that stands in the way of our direct realization.

Rather than turning the attention outward to various objects of practice–mantras, counting the breath, focusing on sound–what changes when we cultivate our effortless capacity to rest the attention in Awareness?

What changes as we practice inquiry into the nature of consciousness?

And how might this approach to practice support our recognition of what’s inherent rather than feed our conditioned tendency to strive?

Embodying Emotions with Somatic Meditation
2020-09-06 10:00 - 11:00

Emotional Sobriety: Comfortable in Your Own Skin
2020-08-02 10:00 - 11:00
Facebook Event Link: https://www.facebook.com/events/1400167713509983/

Gary Sanders lives in Portland, OR. He is originally from the Los Angeles area, where he was the founder of SCV Mindfulness and led up to three weekly meditation groups for over 5 years. He was empowered to lead Buddhist meditation and dharma groups at Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society. He helped, from the ground level, to found Refuge Recovery, a Buddhist based recovery program for all addictions, which has now spread worldwide. After moving to Portland, Gary was asked to join the teaching staff at Portland Insight Meditation Community. Gary travels frequently and teaches daylongs and workshops all over North America and now endorses the Recovery Dharma program.

Reflection on Recovery
2020-07-05 10:00 - 11:00
Having just passed the milestone of 35 years sober, exactly half his life, Kevin looks back on his own path and the lessons he has learned as a clean and sober Buddhist.

Kevin Griffin is a Buddhist teacher and author in the Theravada tradition. He is a co-founder of the Buddhist Recovery Network and teaches internationally across Buddhist traditions. He has been a Buddhist practitioner and in recovery for over three decades. His teacher training was at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Northern California, where he still teaches his flagship Dharma and Recovery class. Besides teaching at Buddhist and other spiritual centers, Kevin works with treatment centers and has consulted with leading addiction researchers.

Meditation | Practice for Challenging Times
2020-06-07 10:00 - 11:00
We will offer a meditation and an opportunity to be together in Sangha, with an emphasis on sustaining practice in these challenging times. Please join us this Sunday, June 7th, led by Robin Smith.

Grounding in Uncertainty
2020-05-03 10:00 - 11:00
“Nothing in the whole universe is comparable to the mind or can take its place. Everything is mind-made.” _Ayya Kheme
I will guide our meditation on the cultivation of kindness and establishing your place of refuge during meditation so that you may begin to train the mind in stillness and peace. Now more than ever, the medicine of the Buddhadharma can help heal our mind-hearts and body by establishing a practice of the essentials in concentration and mindfulness.

Carol Cano, M.A. began her practice over 30 years ago at Wat Kow Tahm in Thailand and has actively engaged in building communities and teaching Dharma internationally. She has completed a myriad of training programs at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and is currently participating in their Retreat Teacher Training. Carol is a core teacher and was a former board member of East Bay Meditation Center. Carol co-founded Philippine Insight Meditation Community in Philippines. Her unique teachings are deeply grounded in Basque, Native American and Buddhist influences that braid the Dharma along indigenous wisdom and Earth-based practices. Carol reminds us to keep grounded in our hearts as we uphold spiritual ideals and encourages us to remain balanced within the demands of modern life. To find out more about Carol, please visit www.carolcano.com.

Effortless Mindfulness for Addiction Recovery: One Glimpse at a Time
2020-04-05 10:00 - 11:00
The Effortless Mindfulness approach to addiction draws on Buddhist meditation from Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism. Effortless Mindfulness is a direct approach that considered an advanced, yet simple way to access our true nature and treat suffering at its root. The 2 main premises are: craving is caused by living from our small separate sense of self and there is an already installed awakened consciousness that we can learn to shift into and live from.

The main practice is small glimpses many times a day, rather than long periods of meditation. Rather than focusing and concentrating to calm our minds we begin by opening awareness to a spacious and pervasive subtle level of awareness based knowing. At this time of challenge we will learn simple effortless mindfulness practices as a way to shift out of our addictive mind and into our heart mind.

The Way of Effortless Mindfulness

Loch Kelly, M.Div., LCSW is author of the award-winning book, The Way of Effortless Mindfulness. He is a licensed psychotherapist and recognized leader in the field of meditation and awakening. He is the founder of the non-profit, Open-Hearted Awareness Institute and has worked in community mental health, established homeless shelters and counseled family members of 9/11. Loch graduated from Columbia University and received a fellowship to study in Sri Lanka and India. Loch collaborates with neuroscientists at Yale, UPenn and NYU in the study of how awareness training can enhance compassion and wellbeing. Loch is dedicated to reducing suffering and supporting people to live from open-hearted awareness. Loch is known for his warm sense of humor, and his trust that awakening is the next natural stage of development. He teaches the advanced, yet simple, nondual pointers and direct methods of effortless mindfulness, informed by psychology and social justice. Loch lives in New York City with his wife Paige and their cat Duffy. Info at www.lochkelly.org

Facebook Event Link

Add to Google Calendar

Perfect As We Are: A Self Compassion Practice
2020-03-01 10:00 - 11:00
In this session we will release self-doubt and/or self-blame, and engage in a practice of self-love and self-forgiveness.

Fresh “Lev” White is a love and compassionate activist. He offers mindfulness, coaching, mediation, and diversity trainings as tools for shifting towards more authentic, conscious and passionate living. He teaches and writes about how love and self-compassion are the ultimate gateways to loving and understanding others; thus, healing our communities, and our planet.
As a coach and Founder of Affirmative Acts Consulting, Lev supports executives, entrepreneurs, artists and other coaches with achieving their goals. Through value alignment, offering accountability and helping to create individual practices of self-care, and self-compassion, his clients have successfully improved their management skills, founded organizations, and taken leadership roles in new executive and director positions. Through the practice of mindfulness, Lev helps clients see clearly through their fears, and improve their emotional responses to challenging situations, which supports strengthening their efficiency and expanding their creativity, in all areas of their life.
Lev has offered over 200 diversity trainings in the Bay Area and beyond. He earned facilitation skills through his coaching certification, and an extensive leadership training program, each through the Co-Active Training Institute (formally known as The Coaches Training Institute) in 2011. He was trained on delivering LGBTQIA+ Ally trainings by CUAV in 2002, and in 2005 became a Certified Trainer through Out and Equal Workplace Advocates.”

Concrete Beds and Wooden Pillows... Waking Up the Hard Way (or Finding Insight but not Serenity)
2020-02-02 10:00 - 11:00
Sixteen years ago, I sat my first 10-day silent ‘Anapansati’ retreat at Wat Suan Mokkh monastery in southern Thailand. Wat Suan Mokkh has a separate retreat centre famous for its basic accommodation which includes concrete beds and wooden pillows. There, from a seeming inability to meditate came a small but ultimately profound and eventually life-changing understanding. At the time I might have called this unexpected understanding an ‘Insight’ but right now I would say that it lacked ‘Mindfulness’ and at the time it didn’t lead to ‘Serenity’!
The Buddha says “…for the direct knowledge, for the full understanding, for the utter destruction, for the vanishing, for the fading away, for the cessation, for the giving up, for the relinquishment of hatred, delusion, anger, hostility, envy, miserliness, deceitfulness, arrogance, intoxication these two things are to be cultivated. Which two? Serenity and insight.”
Together, Serenity and Insight can bring an end to greed, an end to hatred and an end of ignorance, including all of the countless other intoxicating inclinations.
But both Serenity and Insight need to be supported by Right Mindfulness.
When we cultivate Serenity and Insight with Mindfulness, we open up new ways of seeing the self, new ways of seeing the world, and new ways of seeing ourselves in the world.
It is said that we are all living in a dream, that we are all asleep, we are all under a spell, an enchantment that blinds us to the inherent biases, distortions and dissonances that are deeply embedded in fundamentally and simply being human; in being ourselves.
The Buddha says that to find liberation, we must become disenchanted; we must break the spell in order to reveal what has been hidden from us. You do not have to sleep on concrete beds and wooden pillows to wake up to how things really are!
Please join me on Sunday, February 2, for some Mindfulness, some Serenity and maybe even some Insight at the Buddhist Recovery Academy.

Generosity: Transforming the Heart
2020-01-05 10:00 - 11:00
As we embark into a new year, we will explore the importance of cultivating generosity (d?na) and gratitude (kataññuta) and turning our intentions toward the interrelationship of the two. The practice of generosity is at the foundation of Buddhist teachings. At its essence, dana is radical because it is the practice of giving freely without an expectation of receiving something in return and of realizing our interconnection to all that is. Dana is a trusting step, confidence that allows us to let go and open to life. Kara will discuss the nature of dana, how it can be practiced, and its connection to the path of liberation.

Watch the Triggers: The Festive Season is Here
2019-12-01 10:00 - 11:00
Top up on tips and coping mechanisms to deal with the holidays. Do the festive season with a sense of freedom and joy.

Breaking Free of Habits
2019-11-03 10:00 - 11:00
During this talk Martine will look at the habits that bind us and stop our potential for wisdom and compassion manifesting fully. She will explore the meditative tools found in the Vipassana tradition like mindfulness of the breath, sounds and feeling tones to show how we can engage creatively with our habits and transform them into positive functions.

Noticing Tracking and Shifting Perception
2019-10-06 10:00 - 11:00
There is a correlation between our inner state of being and our outer circumstances. By noticing our inner sensations and thoughts, tracking them to witness their changes, we make the unconscious conscious and can hold the inner and the outer experiences in an attitude of expanded focus. Observing our own continuously evolving experience centers us in reality and allows us to nourish whatever arises with less fear and more love. Developing an increased capacity for resiliency allows for a shift in perception toward a more loving state of being in which to create our reality. In this webinar we will discover our own organic wisdom to notice patterns, track changes and transform limited perceptions. Rather than a constant search for that elusive something out there, we turn attention within to feel for what wants to emerge.
Noticing thoughts, stories and sensations and tracking them to observe positive changes as they happen can shift our perception, and create greater clarity and meaning in life.

Kara Haney - September 2019
2019-09-01 10:00 - 11:00

Recovery Is Now, Awareness Is the Key
2019-08-04 10:00 - 11:00
Joan has had personal experience with alcohol addiction, a fingerbiting compulsion (classified as an impulse-control disorder), compulsive thinking, and depression. She does not believe there is one recovery model that fits everyone, and she encourages people to find what works for them. What she offers is an approach rooted in open awareness – giving nonjudgmental attention to the whole happening that we call ‘addiction’ or ‘compulsion’ or ‘depression,’ without trying to change it, but simply shedding light on it. She also stresses the liberating recognition that both our apparent imperfections and the stormy weather in life are often essential to evolutionary growth and transformation, and that the light and the dark go together and cannot be pulled apart. Joan does not consider herself a Buddhist and does not belong to any tradition, but she has spent time with a number of Buddhist teachers, including Charlotte Joko Beck, Steve Hagen, Anam Thubten and Mel Weitsman, and her main teacher, Toni Packer, was a former Zen teacher who left the tradition behind to work in a more open way.

Living an Authentic Life
2019-07-07 10:00 - 11:00
A life free from craving, addictions and compulsions isn’t just about avoiding intoxicants, it invites the opportunity to live a full and authentic life with creativity and joy. This isn’t just a possibility. Research suggests that although people in recovery from substance misuse often suffer more in the first year, in the longer term they are on average happier than the general population. Could this be because recovery demands effort, self-reflection and a willingness to change? We will explore how we can use these qualities on the Buddha’s path as a self-study and training programme that shines a light on the mistakes we make so that we can give them up and live life on life’s terms. Living an authentic life, in harmony with the Dharma is a life of peace and joy. Please join me as we explore this together.

Trauma, Addiction and Self-Regulation
2019-06-02 10:00 - 11:00
Trauma, whether connected to early childhood, an event as an adult or to social oppression, changes our nervous system, our physiological responses to life and impacts our self image, relational capacities, perception and self regulatory abilities. It is, in my view, a core underlying cause for the arising of addiction patterns. Looking through the trauma lense, addiction could be viewed as a means of regulating the underlying pervasive dis-regulation associated with addiction. Therefore “recovery” involves “recovering” or more likely developing self regulatory capacities. What we learn in Meditation is that where we direct or attention has a profound impact on the way we feel. In this session I’ll give an overview of trauma and how it functions and offer a few simple attention based or reflective exercises that support regulation of the nervous system. With trauma, self regulatory capacities are lost or never developed. And it is, in my view one of the core causal factors in addiction Often people with a history of trauma will have extra challenges that require additional tools and a different framework for how to think about what it means to be present without overwhelm.

Racism In The Buddhist Sangha
2019-05-05 10:00 - 11:00

Letting Go of Our Stories
2019-04-07 10:00 - 11:00
As soon as we’re born we’re faced with what life throws at us and we develop ways of coping that may or may not be beneficial. We’re also bombarded with messages from family, friends, school and society at large about who we are and what we should or shouldn’t be. These habits and messages become embedded and we may not even be aware of them, but they influence us on a daily basis. This is what the Buddha means when he talks about our conditioning. This conditioning can harden into the unwise stories we believe; craving and addiction are a destructive way of handling these beliefs.
In order to move towards freedom we have to wake up to our conditioning and disentangle it. Slowing down the mind and taking a step back to see the impersonal nature of the mind and developing a deep intimacy with our experience is how we move toward letting go of the craving and addiction. This talk will offer ways to examine our stories and the baggage we carry with us and investigate how to let them go in order to live a more liberated life.

The Pearl in Sorrow's Hand
2019-03-03 10:00 - 11:00
I have recently been considering the nature of ‘Dukkha’ or ‘suffering’ or ‘stress’ in a Buddhist context, particularly how it plays itself out in my life.
One ancient talk goes along the lines… “Now what, friends, is the noble truth of stress? Birth is stressful, illness is stressful, aging is stressful, death is stressful…”
Birth, sickness, old-age and death are all unavoidable… and undeniably stressful.
I visited one of my favourite aunts in Cork last month. She has advanced dementia, so she doesn’t know who anyone is, and she must have all of her personal care provided for her. She was being cared for by her 82-year old husband and surrounded and supported by a large loving family taking care of her every need.
It was inspiring to see her held in so much love. But it was equally sad to see a once vibrant wife, mother, grandmother, aunt and good friend as a mere shadow — almost unrecognisable — of her former ‘self’.
The truth of ‘birth, sickness, old-age and death’ is the usual description of universal suffering given by the Buddha, and I sometimes forget that the full definition of Dukkha is more than that, quite literally, the complete explanation goes…
“Now what, friends, is the noble truth of stress? Birth is stressful, aging is stressful, death is stressful; sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair are stressful; association with the unbeloved is stressful; separation from the loved is stressful; not getting what is wanted is stressful…”
So, sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair are stressful… again these are not really avoidable. To be human is to experience physical and emotional discomforts. But can I experience these without becoming overwhelmed by them? I suppose that is the practice.
“Association with the unbeloved is stressful; separation from the loved is stressful; not getting what is wanted is stressful…”
Daily life is inconstant, unpredictable, uncertain, it is woven together with impermanence. I cannot control what I get and what I don’t get, but – whether I like it or not – this is my life. To argue with impermanence and uncertainty is to argue with the inarguable.
I have a recurring theme in my head lately. The closing verses from the long version of Rumi’s poem ‘The Guest House’…
“And if the pearl is not in sorrow’s hand,let it go and still be pleased.Increase your sweet practice.Your practice will benefit you at another time;someday your need will be suddenly fulfilled.”
So, maybe, that’s what we all have to do… increase our sweet practice… and then, I hope friends, that someday all of our genuine needs will be suddenly fulfilled.
