Dharma explorations by Stephanie Noble

From over fifteen years of sharing her understanding of Buddhist concepts

  • All about birthdays

    Ah, my birthday. Again. I remember when birthdays took forever to arrive. All that anticipation! One of my granddaughters recently turned five and she could barely contain herself with the anxious excitement. It seemed like her special day would never come, especially since she had to somehow survive her little sister’s birthday the week before.…

  • The Wisdom of the Breath, the last tetrad of the Anapanasati Sutta

    The fourth and final tetrad of the Anapanasati Sutta is called the Wisdom Group. Continuing to be present with the breath, the Buddha instructs us first to focus on impermanence. We can do this by noting how sensations in the body arise and fall away, how the breath itself changes over the course of our…

  • Thoughts & emotions in meditation, continuing the Anapanasati Sutta

    In our continuing exploration of the Anapanasati Sutta, the Buddha’s teaching on mindfulness of the breath, we now come to the third Tetrad, the Mind Group. Here we bring our friendly focused attention to the whole of the mind, which includes the heart in this tradition so that we notice both thoughts and emotions as…

  • Breath focus continues…

    This week in class we continued our exploration in meditation of the Anapanasati Sutta (mindfulness of the breath), this time adding the second tetrad, the Feelings Group. If you recall from our exploration of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, ‘feelings’ are not emotions but our basic response to experience as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. So…

  • Concentration & The Problem with problems

    The word ‘concentration’ is so misleading because of the way we think we need to configure our brains to do it. We think of it as a tightening and narrowing of or focus. But Wise Concentration is actually a much softer and friendlier way of paying attention to what is arising in this moment. I…