Vipassana Hawaii

Today's Sunday Sitting! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_zW4Q0Y5T0

Aloha friends - Please check out this next installment of documentary work from inside the democracy movement in Burma. This is a short interview with a school teacher who has taken up the Civil Disobedience Movement cause against the military junta. Very powerful! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEwxZTypfCo

In honor of #pride and #lovingday we wanted to make public a few changes to the metta (lovingkindness) chant that Vipassana Hawaii offers. With the help of our friend Jake Davis, we have added two new categories to those we include in our field of lovingkindness: Since males (purisa) and females (itthiyo) have always been traditionally included, we have now added "napusakni" which is the Pali word for a gender that is "neither male nor female." Howe wonderful that there is... an ancient Pali word for that?! While it still may not cover all the varietyt of ways people are coming to express their gender identities, we feel it covers the range between polarities in a meaningful way. The idea that anyone would feel explicitly excluded from the field of merit being generated by the practice of metta felt anathema to the entire notion. Similarly, we feel that our chant should attune to the many categories of social division which our society increasingly acknowledges a need for our field of love to cover, but are not spelled out explicitly in the traditional chant. In terrible resonance with the West, the cultural forces in what would later become India also developed a pernicious association of skin-tone with social position. Thus, the word "vanna" on one hand means color, but it also can mean a spectrum of hierarchical social distinctions such as race, caste, class, rank, etc. And so, just as the Buddha transformed the meaning and use of older words to fall into accord with his teachings, we felt it appropriate to adopt "vanna" to acknowledge the pain caused by the variety of social divisions and our explicit aspiration to cultivate a love that permeates beyond all boundaries of social hierarchy. Please feel free to share or use. May all beings be free from hardship and oppression! May all beings be free! (FYI we had previously added "beings that move in fire" to the later section to honor Pele, the deity who lives in one of our local volcano here on the Big Island of Hawaii) https://www.dropbox.com//Metta%20Chanting%20Vipassana%20Ha

Talk from today's Sunday sitting. Next week - back to our regular program! https://youtu.be/cjRGTUaLv4g

Join our Resident Teacher Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey this July for a 4-part spoon-carving workshop where he will teach the basics of the craft and hold space for conversations about labor, value, ownership, and identity! https://wholecommunities.org/virtual-com/karma-and-carving/

Our Sunday Sitting this week was a talk from Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey as part of the 10-day Seeing Security Everywhere online retreat. Next week will also be a talk before we return on the following Sunday to our normal sit/talk/q&a format! https://youtu.be/SLEyZHZYZeQ