Dharma explorations by Stephanie Noble

From over fifteen years of sharing her understanding of Buddhist concepts

  • On Retreat at Spirit Rock

    I just returned from a week-long silent meditation retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County, CA. Ah, bliss! On the last day of the retreat I felt like my mind was a still clear pond. I wasn’t spaced out or off somewhere else, as you might expect, but, on the contrary, more fully…

  • Dana: The Mystery of How Much to Give

    I am on retreat this week at Spirit Rock, so there is no class, therefore no dharma talk to post here. But attending a retreat reminds me that I haven’t shared here about the tradition of giving dana (donation) to the teachers. Actually at Spirit Rock, all the retreat staff – the cooks and housekeeping…

  • Freedom from ‘Our Story’ through Meditation

    We talk about the lure of thoughts during meditation, but what about when we are not meditating: Don’t we have to go back to thinking? If we didn’t, how could we live in the world? Vipassana or insight meditation is about staying present with what is in our current experience so that we develop the…

  • Freedom from believing we are our thoughts

    We have finished our exploration of creativity, having explored it from many different angles. Now I’d like to begin to explore another concept in the same way: the idea of freedom. The first exploration is freedom from believing we are our thoughts. We looked into this last July, and I would like to revisit it…

  • Yin, Yang & You

    This is the Yin Yang symbol. It was developed over 2000 years ago in China by followers of the Tao, a philosophy for leading a richer more meaningful life. It was probably originally created as a teaching tool, and that’s how I will use it here, because this isn’t just some symbol of some foreign…