What I thought would be fun to speak to today and this week was something of an overview of the teachings, and partly an overview of Buddhism in general, but specifically, what are we actually doing here in this community, or what am I teaching, really regardless of the community. For some of you who've been coming for some while, this will probably be things you hear me say all the time, kind of woven in and out.

But I think there may be also something nice about just having it all condensed. Like, oh, this is what we're doing here. If I had to put it very briefly in one sentence, it's to help establish and deepen people in the Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path. To do that in a way that's true to the tradition, but also fresh and alive. That puts aside all the dogmas and intellectualizations.

And that more than anything is really interested in how do we bring this to life in our own experience, right here, right now. And then we leave this room and we go off into our day and how do we continue to bring this alive? So to see this as a really living practice, what I find to be a really helpful starting point is the teaching on the three refuges, sometimes also called the three jewels or three gems, these qualities of Buddha, Dhamma, Saṅgha.

And in brief, we could translate that as to take refuge in Buddha, the possibility of awakening, in Dhamma, the path of practice, and in Saṅgha, the community of practitioners.

If you ever go to a monastery or Buddhist center, chances are you'll be chanting these refuges quite often, often in the Pāli language of the Buddha, also in English. I take refuge in Buddha, I take refuge in Dhamma, I take refuge in Saṅgha. On a preliminary level, it can be a little intellectual, but as we start to practice, we see these three things are tangible qualities, tangible entities that hold us, that support us, that nourish us along our journey of meditation, Buddhism, and more generally, life itself.

Some people see this as some religious artifact, take refuge, and blah, blah, blah. Personally, I really like that word refuge. I find something very beautiful about it. I heard one teacher describe it kind of like a wildlife refuge, this area that is safe and protected, that really nourishes animals. And so we could think of these three refuges as things that nourish and support us in our lives.

Question one might consider is when times are difficult or you are bored or upset or confused or grumpy or whatever, where do you go for relief? Do you go to social media? You go to ice cream? You go to shopping? More work? Social connection? Complaining? Sex? Movies? And whatever you say, essentially that's your refuge. And we can probably quickly see there are some refuges that are maybe a little bit more nourishing than others.

When I was younger, some of my refuge was alcohol. That wasn't a very nourishing refuge. It might get me to stop feeling the icky thing a little bit.

And so anyhow, as we go on in our spiritual practice, this kind of arc of a Buddhist life, we learn how to take on more robust, genuinely supportive, genuinely nourishing refuges. and some part of this is purely internal somewhere we can go in our own being to take refuge in body sensations but there's another part that's external literally being supported by other human beings that refuge of saṅgha community we can also go external to say teachings go find a quote read a passage read a book something about that can be very grounding i wanted to just briefly talk about each of these three refuges on their own.

We could easily spend a couple weeks just on this one thing, but to just kind of lightly touch into it. So this first refuge of Buddha, the historical figure, the founder of the tradition, Siddhartha Gautama, when he became enlightened, he took on this kind of title of Buddha, which means one who is awakened. And so that potential for awakening lives in all of us. It wasn't special or specific to this one guy.

It's this potential, the seed of potential that exists in every human mind to awaken. And one of the main ways the Buddha talked about awakening was a mind that is absent of greed, aversion, and delusion.

This force of wanting or craving, not wanting or not craving. I sometimes just call it the push-pull, the grasp and resist get this away from me get that towards me and then the delusion the the way maybe to go right to the core the mistaken views we have about things the ways of perceiving life that aren't in accordance with how they are so for just to put that aside for the moment no mind that is absent of those in the greater arc of practice the journey of awakening is sometimes talked about like the slow descent of the ocean floor you can go down it step by step by step by step and little by little you'll get deeper and then every so often there's some dramatic drop off in the open ocean floor drop down 100 meters and then down and down step by step by step by step maybe another dramatic drop off so our practice we can have some of these dramatic awakening experiences and it's like something really drops off something really shifts but a lot of the practice in my experience and talking to others is it's this slow steady movement forward the slow steady movement into awakening the releasing of affliction releasing of greed aversion and delusion there are some kind of well-known monastic teachers that really emphasize this absence of greed aversion and delusion yeah it happens in this big awakening way but any moment of our lives without those forces is a moment of awakening.

And this is something we can really take refuge in. We can really get a taste for it because it happens to all of us, you know, little moments here and there. And when we start to notice it, say, oh, I don't have to get upset about everything. I don't have to react the way I always do. Yeah, so someone was mean to me. So I'm caught in traffic.

So I tripped and fell and spilled my coffee. Okay, it's like this. I don't need to add all that noise in. It's just here. And in that, that's a moment of taking refuge in Buddha, taking refuge in this possibility of living our life without reactivity. And so what I'm pointing to here is this freedom, this groundedness, this peace, this refuge of Buddha. It's not limited to our meditation cushion.

This is available every moment of our day. And that's really the point of this practice and this tradition, to live it, not just to have it isolated in these little pockets when we meditate. The refuge of Dhamma, the second one, the teachings, the path of practice.

I'm going to spend most of the next couple days talking about the Dhamma. So just in brief, one, we could, I like to kind of condense it to take refuge in awareness. This is really the central teaching. The Buddha calls mindful awareness the direct path to awakening, direct path to that freedom, that absence of craving, aversion, delusion, or to really know what's happening as it's happening, to just see it clearly, okay, body sensations are here, moodiness is here, it's just what's happening, and we'll go into this in quite a bit more depth shortly, but the other one, I would say, in terms of the Dhamma, the teachings, we can take refuge in our integrity, in our wholesome actions, our moral compass, and in any given moment of life, if you're not sure what to do, you're confused, or maybe you're actually really upset about someone or upset about something and you're not sure what to do.

Can we take refuge in our integrity? Say, wait a minute, it doesn't actually help anything if I just add a bunch of reactivity and more upset and animosity and hatred to the mix. And sometimes it can be very tempting in this polarized world we live in. But when we can take refuge in that integrity, it generally tends to support and nourish us, support and nourish also our communities, our world.

And so we could say that that is a Dhamma we can trust. The third refuge of Saṅgha, the community of spiritual practitioners, you could find through a meditation group like this one, maybe even just one person in our life that we have a real connection with, that we can connect with on a deeper level, to talk about matters of real importance, of the heart, of practice. And I've never met anyone who's been able to do this practice in total isolation over the long run.

It's just very difficult. We're not really wired like that as humans. And in Saṅgha, there's some level of just overt support from being around others, the direct support, layers of inspiration, of having things modeled, getting feedback, having a place where our worth isn't measured in our status and performance or articulateness or whatever the thing is. It's a place we see I'm already enough. A place we're just encouraged to just explore.

What is it to live well without a bunch of backhanded judgments? And for me, the vision of the communities I lead and the ones that I like to be a part of is to actually have people engage with each other. Because I don't know, it does some good to go to a group for years and never talk to anyone and never learn anyone's name but it does way more good when you actually interact with other practitioners so i've run out of time so we're gonna end here and just going into the sit i'd say maybe just take a moment in whatever way you can connect with this teaching of the three refuges buddha dhamma saṅgha see if you can start out by calling upon those see if there's a way that they can support and nourish you in your practice today, and by extension, in your life, to find a sense of really beautiful refuge.

We'll see you in a bit.