by Carol Russell
Adapted from a talk given at Tuesday night meditation on July 1, 2025

This talk is based on the third invitation in Frank Ostaseski’s book, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully. This is the third talk in this exploration of the book in which I have been using each invitation as a stepping off point for an exploration of the Dhamma.

The invitation here is to bring your whole self to the experience of life. The author writes beautifully about how this applies to the processes of dying and death, whether yours or someone you love, and how it applies to grief. Most certainly, in light of the subtitle of the book, this invitation applies to bringing our whole self to each day of life, to each moment.  This is an encouragement to include the parts of ourselves that don’t look good, or reveal we don’t have it all together.

In a way you could think of the last talk I gave, Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing, as how we receive the circumstances of life, how we open to what is coming in. This talk is an exploration of what we bring to the circumstance arising in life. the invitation is to bring our whole selves to our experience.

Frank Ostaseski writes:
"…more than once I have found an undesirable aspect of myself, one about which I had previously felt ashamed and kept tucked away, to be the very quality that allowed me to meet another person’s suffering with compassion instead of fear or pity… It is not our expertise, but rather the wisdom gained from our own suffering, vulnerability, and healing that enables us to be of real assistance to others."

by Carol Russell
Adapted from a talk given at Prescott Insight Meditation on May 6, 2025

My Mom died three weeks ago. She died the way she lived, with a good measure of love, and honesty, acceptance, and a sense of wonder. Not that it was easy. Death is hard work. Accompanying her on this journey – from 11 years ago when she had her first stroke to the final week when she took to her bed – has been a priceless honor. Although we miss her very much, how she died is a profound part of the gift she leaves her family and the people who cared for her.

What does death have to offer those of us left behind? What does death have to offer the living? Death has the potential to inform us – and to transform us. Some of us have had death touch us recently, as I have, or we are aging and feeling it, or we have a diagnosis that makes death a little more tangible. But really, we are all on the edge of death. How many of us think death will happen later – sometime in the distant future? The truth is death can come any moment. If not us imminently, it could be someone we love very much.

This is what the Dhamma teaches us. The Buddha encouraged this kind of reflection, conceptually and experientially, not as a theoretical idea, but to touch into the reality of change and endings, life and death. This kind of study penetrates to the level that it penetrates for each of us, perhaps touching us more profoundly as our practice deepens.

Foundational to our mindfulness practice is the question we can bring to whatever is arising in our lives: what is my relationship to it? What is my relationship to dying and death? Maybe we recoil. Maybe we’re curious. Some face the truth of the end of life with a comforting story of something beyond. Perhaps we have decided we will think about death when we are older. Our relationship to death is very personal.

by Carol Russell
This essay is adapted from a talk given at the Tuesday night sangha gathering on November 12, 2024

I want to begin by acknowledging the deep feelings many people are experiencing right now as our country has just gone through an intense election season, whether or not the results went the way you were hoping. You may be experiencing fear, worry, anger, or despair, or you might be feeling relief and gladness.

Tonight, we will be exploring the states of expansion and contraction. I am using the term openness alongside expansion, since it captures a certain quality that is important. First, we will look at what might each of these experiences be. How are they valuable? And then we will explore how they work together. It is my hope that spending some time broadening our understanding of these two qualities that are part of our human experience might bring some understanding and solace for the times we are in.

Contraction

One view of contraction is the experience we have when we are living in own narrow view of life. We are up in our head ruminating on our own little world. It can feel like we have fallen in a well; that contracted feeling is our own personal well. It is constricted and isolated. There’s a little patch of light up there, but it casts a dim light. It becomes so normal to us to live within this narrow view that we don’t realize we are in it. This is all so very human.

As practitioners of mindfulness, we begin to have a different experience. There’s a quality of mindfulness that allows us to take a step back and open to a broader view. In our mindfulness practice, we find there is a kind of back and forth, from softness, openness, and expansiveness to being lost in a story where all there is in the experience of the story and all its papancca or proliferation, as the story spins out in our minds, and then back to the open state of being mindful. This back and forth can be very revealing about the possibilities of our own mind.

by Carol Russell
A dharma talk given May 21, 2024

This is something I have been considering lately.  The Buddha seemed very interested in working with what it is to be a human being. After he encountered the four sights as a young man (old age, sickness, death, and an ascetic person), what he saw sent him on his spiritual search After his ascetic phase, in which he had so mortified his body he nearly starved himself, he realized this way of denial was not leading to the end of suffering. In his realization, he no longer sought to transcend the human body. The teachings he brought forth recognize humanness, the human condition. After his liberation, he brought his teachings right into this conventional everyday muddled human life. He illuminated the middle way as a way to liberation from dissatisfaction: not indulging and not denying.

We eat, so instead of getting rid of eating, which didn’t go well for him, he brought in teachings around eating. Teachings we now have of self-care, of non-harming, of mindful eating.

He recommended we seek out quiet spaces to practice. But instead of insisting on total silence, and having aversion to the inevitable noise, he taught how to incorporate sound into practice. Through this we learn that nothing is outside of mindfulness.

Humans are talkers, so he made recommendations for how speech might be used that is mindful and appropriate to the situation. This is the subject of tonight’s talk. Wise speech.

In fact, mindful speech holds a prominent place in these teachings. This is surely a reflection of how important the Buddha regarded communication. In the Noble Eightfold Path teachings, a wholistic practical summary of the path, wise speech is singled out as one of the eight keys of practice leading to liberation. Wise speech gets its very own place

By Carol Russell
A dharma talk given April 2, 2024

From Anguttara Nikaya Sutta 9.3 With Meghiya

[In February I was on a week-long retreat with Brian Lesage & Diana Clark. Over five of the retreat days, they gave five dharma talks that corresponded to this teaching. Some of this talk comes from my notes from that retreat, some from my own thoughts.]

The story of Meghiya begins as many Buddhist stories do: so I have heard.

The Buddha is staying near Calika. Meghiya was the Buddha’s attendant. One day Meghiya goes up to the Buddha and asks to go to the nearby village for alms. The Buddha agrees.

So, in the morning, Meghiya robes up, takes his bowl, and goes for almsround. On his way back, he walks along the shore of the river and comes upon a mango grove. He thinks:

“Oh, this mango grove is lovely and delightful! This is good enough for striving for someone wanting to strive. If the Buddha allows me, I’ll come back to this mango grove to meditate.”

When he got back to the Buddha, Meghiya asks if he can go to the mango grove to meditate. The Buddha asks him to wait, since there’s no one else there to help out. He asks that Meghiya wait until someone else shows up to take Meghiya’s place.

A bit later, Meghiya is impatient and says, Hey, there’s nothing else to do. How about now? Can I go to the mango grove to meditate? Again, the Buddha says, We’re alone Meghiya. Wait until someone else comes.

A third time Meghiya asks: “Sir, the Buddha has nothing more to do, and nothing that needs improvement. But I have. If you allow me, I’ll go back to that mango grove to meditate.” The Buddha says, “Meghiya, since you speak of meditation, what can I say? Please, Meghiya, go at your convenience.”

Meghiya goes to the mango grove, plunges deep into it, and sits down at the root of a tree for the day’s meditation. But while he is meditating, he is beset by three kinds of bad, unskillful thoughts, namely, sensual, malicious, and cruel thoughts.

by Carol Russell
A dharma talk given October 18, 2022

Gratitude for the inspiration for this talk goes to David Loy, Buddhist scholar, practicing Zen Buddhist and one of the founders of Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center, and to Joanna Macy, PhD, Buddhist scholar, systems thinker, activist, and root teacher for the Work That Reconnects.

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Philosopher and social commentator Noam Chomsky recently said, "We’re approaching the most dangerous point in human history." He includes the potential for climate catastrophe, the threat of nuclear war, as well as the rise in authoritarian governments and the decline of democracy around the world, as the most pressing and threatening dangers to the world at this time.

What does Buddhism offer us in these times? Are we here to ‘wake up?’ Does that mean our own personal salvation journey or are we here to wake up to what is happening in the world?

Maybe less so now, in Western Buddhism, but historically, there has been an interpretation that the goal of practice is to transcend this world – not being reborn is the ultimate attainment. This can lead to a kind of indifference to and withdrawal from the threats to the world. Why be concerned with fixing the problems of the world if the goal is to get out of here?

Joseph Campbell, author and scholar of religion and mythology said:
Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

Is this true in Buddhism?

Yesterday morning I was on a hike and I ran into an old acquaintance, a local artist, someone I hadn’t seen in years. I was excited to see him, hear how his life has been, and connect. An interesting, although in retrospect maybe not uncommon, thing happened. He told me how well his life has been going, how the Pandemic hadn’t really changed anything for him; he was still making art. At some point I mentioned I hoped that the Pandemic was teaching us some things about working together to solve bigger problems that are causing suffering in the world. That set him off on a series of thoughts that made it clear that he and I had very different ideas about many things and he was eager to let me know his point of view. In the midst of it all I shared a few of my own contrasting views, which seemed to increased his opposition.

The conversation was friendly enough, but I walked away from the conversation without the experience of ‘connection’ that I had anticipated when I first saw this person on the trail.

What is this experience of connection that can happen between people? And not just people, but also the experience of connection that transcends the person-to-person relationship. Like what we sometimes sense when we are connecting with an animal, or walking in nature, or looking at the starry sky, or deep in meditation.

Buddhist literature abounds with contemporary writings about the illusion of separation that clouds our experience of our true nature of an open, connected, boundless heart. In Sharon Salzberg’s book, Lovingkindness- The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, she writes:

by Carol Russell
A Dharma Talk given February 23, 2021

We are embarking on an exploration of the core of the Buddha’s teachings, the four noble truths. Our sangha’s founding leader, Carol Cook, had a tradition of beginning each year with an immersion into this subject, because it is utterly central and foundational to our practice. Carol has inspired us to take it up.

Our plan is to take the four truths, one noble truth at a time, and for four weeks each of us will offer an exploration of the truth of the month. This should be especially interesting because of the fact that there are endless ways of examining such a profound teaching: historic, contemporary, esoteric, practical, psychological, experiential, scholarly, and on and on. We are hoping for some interesting conversations amongst all of us in these explorations. Whether it is the first time you are studying these truths or you are circling back for the hundredth time, we know there is always more to understand.  We hope you will take the Buddha’s profound teachings into your daily life and share your fresh discoveries and insights when we meet on Tuesday nights.

Simply put, the four noble truths are:

There is suffering.
There is a cause of suffering.
There is an end of suffering.
The remedy is the eight-fold path.

Did you ever wonder why these are called the ‘noble’ truths? Some say it is because these are the truths which cause nobleness. Of course, we are dealing with translations from the Pali language and a great deal of time passing, and the fact that the teachings were oral for some time, but I recently found this explanation: that it may be more accurate to say, the nobles’ truths, or the truths possessed by the noble ones.  The dictionary definition of noble is: Having or showing qualities of high moral character, such as courage, generosity, and integrity.  So, we are establishing a connection between acknowledging, understanding and freeing ourselves from suffering and these natural and noble qualities of courage, generosity, and integrity.

The First Noble Truth, the truth of suffering. In Pali, the word is dukkha. The truth of dukkha. Sometimes dukkha is translated as ‘dissatisfaction.’ I like that word because it includes more than the overt times of suffering in life, it includes that background feeling that we all have at times that things aren’t reliably satisfying. No matter how great a life you have, this human life is bound to include stress. It may be those underlying existential questions like, what are we doing here? What is it all about? Dukkha is not personal, and it’s ubiquitous in the world of form and incarnation. Everyone has the experience of dissatisfaction.

By Carol Russell
Her first dharma talk, given July 9, 2019

There is a well-known saying: In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.

We admire those who are experts, accomplished in their field, who have spent many years honing a skill or knowledge of their subject, who break new ground in creativity or research or scholarship or athletic ability or spiritual wisdom. And they deserve our admiration.  We seek guidance and inspiration from such accomplished people.

Once, a long time ago, there was a wise Zen master. People from far and near would seek his counsel and ask for his wisdom. Many would come and ask him to teach them, enlighten them in the way of Zen. He seldom turned any away. One day an important man, a man used to command and obedience came to visit the master. “I have come today to ask you to teach me about Zen. Open my mind to enlightenment.” The tone of the important man’s voice was of one used to getting his own way. The Zen master smiled and said that they should discuss the matter over a cup of tea. When the tea was served the master poured his visitor a cup. He poured and he poured and the tea rose to the rim and began to spill over the table and finally onto the robes of the wealthy man. Finally the visitor shouted, “Enough. You are spilling the tea all over. Can’t you see the cup is full?” The master stopped pouring and smiled at his guest. “You are like this tea cup, so full that nothing more can be added. Come back to me when the cup is empty. Come back to me with an empty mind.”