Have you ever felt like only bad things happen to you and that trying to be happy in life is absolutely futile? Guess what. You’re not alone! And what’s more, there is hope. Buddhism offers four noble truths to help understand this feeling and make peace with yourself and the world. Buddhists believe that suffering exists everywhere, all the time, and for everyone. This suffering is caused by our natural human desire to stay alive and fear of our eventual death. By becoming very familiar with the transient fact of our humanity, we can begin to eliminate suffering. The way to do this is by following the steps on the noble eightfold path:
1. Right understanding (Samma ditthi)
2. Right thought (Samma sankappa)
3. Right speech (Samma vaca)
4. Right action (Samma kammanta)
5. Right livelihood (Samma ajiva)
6. Right effort (Samma vayama)
7. Right mindfulness (Samma sati)
8. Right concentration (Samma samadhi)
The four noble truths ground the motivation for spiritual development, and the noble eightfold path guides us in the process. We interviewed members of a local practice community to gain insight into how Buddhist philosophy comes to life in practitioners’ everyday lives. The Insight Meditation Community of Western Mass (IWM) is founded in Vipassana and Theravada Buddhism, offers meditation sessions and dharma talks to the public with the aim of helping others cultivate wisdom, compassion, absolution of suffering, and a sustainable meditation practice.
What sets IWM apart from other communities or mindfulness practices is their dedication to accessibility and social justice. Buddhist teachings always relate back to ethics (sila) and the elimination of the ubiquitous suffering caused by delusion and primal confusion. Meditation is a combination of clearing the mind (samatha) and insight (vipassana). Insight or Vipassana meditation, which is rooted in the Theravada tradition, puts a heightened focus on self-observation and awareness sensations as they arise. By cultivating this state of mindfulness, a practitioner is able to experience deep insight about reality not readily accessible to other mental states.
Hal Fales talked with us about his instant resonance with Buddhism and how he came to IWM as a practitioner and practice leader.
I grew up, came of age in the 60s, so I was exposed to a lot of Eastern thought and occasionally meditation. I took a course on something to do with Buddhism during my masters degree and meditated regularly for about three or four months then dropped it– that was back in the mid-70s. And I sort of thought I knew something about Buddhism, which was not true. And then in 2008– I’m a retired psychologist– and I was supervising someone who is a Buddhist teacher […] and she and I got to talking about Buddhism and I decided I wanted to go sit a retreat, so in 2008 I went to IMS and sat a 10 day retreat with Steven Armstrong and Kamala Masters and haven’t looked back– it just felt like ‘oh yeah this makes perfect sense to me.’
Michael Grady, a teacher with IWM who leads meditations and gives monthly dharma talks, shared his unique insight on the secularization of meditation and how dharma informs the structure of a sangha.
I got introduced to this practice at a place called Naropa Institute which was started by a bunch of Tibetan community, but I didn’t really connect with the Tibetan Buddhism; I connected with a person named Joseph Goldstein who is a Vipassana Insight Meditation teacher and started practicing with him, doing retreats and all of that in 1974. During all these years I’ve practiced and engaged with a lot of different communities and even within different traditions, but predominantly the Vipassana or Insight practice is the one that I have practiced in and been involved in for a lot of years and that’s what I teach– and that comes out of the Theravada tradition. I taught at Cambridge Insight Meditation for 20 years, I’ve been teaching in this community for about 6 years, and I was also involved in Taiwan with a Chan community for a while doing retreats there. Oftentimes people who teach within the Vipassana or Insight tradition have studied in other traditions and teachers have a background in Tibetan Buddhism or Chan, but my orientation and what I offer in terms of teaching is pretty much the methods and the orientation is Vipassana, which is Pali for ‘insight’, so a lot of the texts where the practice comes from is suttas, discourses by the Buddha, so it’s considered one of the earliest if not the earliest sort of form or school of Buddhism […] it started in India with Buddhist teaching then moved to South East Asia, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand– its still very predominant in Burma and Thailand. So then Joseph and a few other Vipassana teachers who studied in Asia came back and started teaching in the mid-70s, so they started teaching retreats and all of that and so I got very involved. And so I started practicing in 1974 and I’ve been teaching since 1995.
IWM hosts regular open meditation practice sessions, which Fen attended: “The meetings were hosted from 7:45 AM- 8:35 AM over Zoom– most of which was made up of silent sitting meditation, but during the last five minutes Hal read a poem. One such poem was At the Tea House by Holly J. Hughs, which contained Buddhist themes about perception and freedom. Only after the interviews did I come to better understand the significance of freedom in this sense: freedom from delusion, primal confusion, and suffering. At first, sitting still without anything to busy myself with was rather difficult and I couldn’t get over the worrying feeling that I was doing something incorrectly. However, after some practice and listening to how meditation, mindfulness, and the inner cultivation of various other skills emphasized in the Vipassana and Theravada tradition help Hal Fales and Michael Grady, I began to clear my mind and let these insecurities pass as they arose. The human mind is a source of great delusion and suffering, but that is also why we should strive to be more aware and examine our experience of them through meditation practices.”
IWM’s course offerings can be found here. You can donate to support IWM’s programming and teachers here.