The Buddha's Four-Part Strategy for "Ultimate Happiness" | Sally Armstrong
10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Media, LLC
4.6 • 12.9K Ratings
🗓️ 3 July 2023
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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"Mindfulness" has become a buzz phrase. There are books on mindful parenting, mindful lawyering, even mindful sex. But what does the word even mean? And how do you actually do it? In one of his most famous and foundational discourses, the Buddha was said to have laid out, in great detail, four ways to establish mindfulness. In today's episode we're going to walk through these four "foundations" of mindfulness with Sally Armstrong, who started practicing in 1981, began teaching 15 years later, and now leads retreats all over the world.
We posted this episode a few years ago, but thought it might be a good time to drop a good, old-fashioned, meat and potatoes, stick to your ribs dharma episode to help us get back to basics. Because, like Sally says, Guru Google can only get us so far…
In this episode we talk about:
- How Sally got started in meditation – including sitting and in person retreat with SN Goenka and living near the Dalai Lama
- Using our meditation to align on intentions and values and seeing that we have a choice once we wake up.
- Where she encounters challenges in her practice today
- The importance of Beginner's mind
- Sally's clear breakdown of the Buddha's Four Foundations of Mindfulness (the first time we've really gone into detail on the show)
For tickets to TPH's live event in Boston on September 7:
https://thewilbur.com/armory/artist/dan-harris/
Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/sally-armstrong-232-rerun
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. |
| 0:19.4 | Hello, my fellow suffering beings. Welcome to the show. You may have heard me make this |
| 0:24.0 | observation before, but mindfulness has become a buzzword. People use it all the time. There are books |
| 0:29.2 | mindful parenting, mindful loyering, even mindful sex. But I have this concern that often people |
| 0:34.4 | use the word don't actually know what it means. Never mind how to actually do it. |
| 0:39.6 | So that's what we're going to talk about today. And one of his most famous and foundational |
| 0:43.1 | discourses, the Buddha was said to have laid out in great detail four ways to establish mindfulness, |
| 0:50.0 | four ways to wake up. In today's episode, we're going to walk through these four foundations of mindfulness |
| 0:56.2 | with Sally Armstrong, who is a great Buddhist meditation teacher. She started practicing in 1981. |
| 1:02.0 | She started teaching 15 years later, and she now leads retreats all over the world. |
| 1:06.0 | We actually conducted and posted this interview several years ago, but we thought right now might |
| 1:10.0 | be a good time to drop a good old-fashioned meat and potatoes, stick your ribs, dharma episode to help |
| 1:16.0 | us get back to basics. Because like Sally says, guru, Google can only get us so far. In this conversation, |
| 1:24.9 | we talked about how Sally got started in meditation, including sitting and in-person retreat with |
| 1:29.6 | the great SN Goenka and also living near the Dalai Lama. We talk about using our meditation to align |
| 1:35.4 | with our intentions and values and seeing that we have a choice between habitual patterns and |
| 1:41.2 | doing the right thing once we wake up, where she encounters challenges in her own practice today. |
| 1:46.4 | The importance of beginners mind and the meat of the interview is probably not the best word to |
| 1:52.8 | use in a Buddhist context. However, the meat of the interview is really on Sally's breakdown of |
| 1:58.6 | the Buddha's four foundations of mindfulness. The body, Vedinas, which are feeling tones, |
| 2:05.5 | Chita, which are mind states and dharma, which are basically categories of experience. Anyway, |
| 2:10.4 | I'm getting a little technical. She'll talk about it in ways that are much easier to grok, |
... |
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