Offered May 23, 2024 Gregory Kramer invites the Insight Dialogue Community to celebrate Vesak together. Vesak day is a celebration and recognition of the Buddha’s birth, awakening and death. It usually occurs on the first full moon of May. A common intention set on this day is a recommitment to Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha. This is a day to remember the Buddha's legacy and celebrate our potential for progress on the path to liberation, just as Gotama did before his awakening. In this talk, Gregory offers the following contemplations: Do you sense your own humanity? your own potential our own vulnerability? Does your own humanity connect you to the Buddha? and inspire you?

The Buddha was interested in understanding the human experience; he was not trying to establish a religion. He wondered why there was human suffering? And he is inviting us into this same inquiry. This recording is a series of talks from various retreats by Gregory Kramer on dosa and adosa stitched together by Insight Dialogue Community member, Kathy Beck-Coon. She wrote up guidance on how this recording can be used for Insight Dialogue practice and to support practice groups. In addition, Insight Dialogue member, Anne Symington, wrote up a summary of the teachings and a timestamp summary of the audio.

Receiving with compassion what is difficult / receiving joy / experiencing mutual equanimity. Guided meditation on the boundless with Open for the first 14:15 minutes. " there is an aspect of Open that is establishing the field of awareness that is the atmosophere in which Metta arises." Four part contemplation, first two separate speaker, last one the entire group 1. "Observe the opening of awareness to every cell of the vody, naming what it is like. This awareness is inclusive and spacious." Contemplate something in your life that is difficult, feeling your heart vibrating with the pain". " Be present to the pain waith compassion for this being, the compassionate response". "Listener, how was it like to receive this?" 2. Now the gift of our practice is to touch joy, something positive, wholesome, uplifting. Let it infuse you, vibrate within you." Listener, touch the experience of hearing about joy. 3." Whatever experience that might be present of mutual or sympathetic equanimity,where the heart balances together." 4. "What is manifesting now? Resting perhaps in the shared human experience of the whole of it; the hurt, the joy the boundless."

Dyad with separate speakers for the first two contemplations 1. straight-forward suffering. The pain can be proliferated and held up and at this micro-level flips into Dukka-dukka 2.the dukka of impermanence, that comes with the instability of things and our responses " Give attention to the quality of receiving." " What is it like to be speaking of this pain of impermanence....; to be hearing it?" 3.the suffering associated waith constructions and the constructing mind "Those images that come and haunt the mind." "That ongoing tumult of the body-mind responding to its own fabrications." "Can we get off the bus?"

This contemplation was for a group of four.

Instruction for Mindful Conversation Exercise In Dining Hall; Wisdom / "Do I Believe My Thoughts And Actions Have Results?"