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The world is a fundamentally chaotic place, and many of us are feeling that today more than ever. We are carrying the stress not only of our personal lives, but also of the world at large. Family, relationships, work, and the travails of making it through this life in a vulnerable human body -- all of that is hard enough. Add to that a hefty dose of the current news cycle, and our hearts can easily get overwhelmed. We feel afflicted: tight, overwhelmed, despondent, angry -- or we simply numb out. This is the outer chaos of the world internalized, mirrored in our own hearts. This is what ancient Buddhist wisdom refers to as "dukkha," often translated as suffering, but perhaps better described as a kind of unsatisfactory unsettledness.  

The theme of this session is how to find inner balance in a world engulfed in chaos. Or, to put it another way -- it's about how the heart can learn to meet its own unsettledness. Doug will draw on his many years of deep engagement with ancient Buddhist wisdom traditions to help us distinguish between "outer" problems -- the problems of the world -- and "inner" problems, the problems of the heart. We tend to put a lot of emphasis on the former, implicitly assuming that if we could just get the outer conditions of the world exactly right, our hearts would finally be happy and at ease. Experience teaches otherwise. Many of the challenges of our lives are not purely "outer" or "inner," but are a combination of the two -- they're a matter of how the heart meets the thing in the world that we don't like, the thing we identify as a problem. Buddhist wisdom offers methods for training the heart to meet the world in a more skillful way. Through guided meditation and contemplative reflections, Doug will distill some of this wisdom into concrete recommendations that we can practice and apply immediately in our lives.