This talk was given as a part of the series "Where Rubber Meets the Road: A Series on Mindful Living." We live in a world that requires a diversity of relationships. How do you choose your friends? What kind of relationships support or stunt your spiritual growth? How do you relate to life, and to love? We can bring wisdom and mindfulness to our interactive lives, to the roles that we perform, to our intimate sexual relationships, and our friendships; we practice both in solitude and in community. Harmony, generosity, and joy are developed through noble friendship. Relationships can challenge us to work with the tendencies of our own minds, clarify our precepts, develop compassion, learn to let go, and nurture the path of awakening. Deep friendship is considered to be the precursor of right view. A good friend encourages the best in us and supports our development of the noble eight fold path.

This talk was given as a part of the series "Where Rubber Meets the Road: A Series on Mindful Living." Vipassana takes our untrained mind as a starting point -- with its unruliness, hindrances, clinging and aversion -- and gives it a clear and systematic way of developing awareness. With practice, this awareness of what's happening within us and around us in any given moment is the key to not being a slave to our thoughts. It also teaches us to rebel against, or turn away from, our mind's tendencies towards greed, hatred and delusion; and instead, to incline our mind towards openness, freedom from attachment, freedom from suffering, loving-kindness, compassion, wisdom, and equanimity. This is the liberating power of awareness and mindfulness.

This talk was given as a part of the series "Where Rubber Meets the Road: A Series on Mindful Living." When we start to meditate, we notice how much our body and mind influence each other. In the teachings of the Buddha, he highlighted a quality of mind at which this point of connection between body and mind happens. It's a factor in the mind he called "intention" or "volition." Intention or volition is a mental urge that impels us to act. Every action that we do of body, of speech, of mind, has this impulse that precedes it. With practice, it is possible to see this urge or impulse. With an intention to act comes motivation -- the reason why we are going to do something or say something. The Buddha said that this is an interesting place to pay attention to, because when we are not aware of our motivations, our habits of mind (such as greed, aversion and delusion) are choosing our motivations for us, and often those habits are not so helpful. So at this moment of choice when we have this intention to act, the motivation that accompanies that intention is what will either lead us down the path towards more struggle in our lives, or lead us down the path towards more happiness in our lives.

This talk was given as a part of the series "Where Rubber Meets the Road: A Series on Mindful Living." A real place for us to check our practice is in our relationships. After all, we are deeply relational beings. Sometimes, our deepest grooves in our minds are only stimulated in relationships. Defilements and habits of mind, such as greed, anger, and delusion, arise in ways that they don't in other situations. In other words, forces of suffering that are latent in other situations can arise in the context of close relationships. Fortunately, this is actually not bad news. Rather, it offers us opportunity to practice, to see ourselves more clearly, to become more free, and to see how we can untangle the love from clinging.