Glimpses of The Beyond

0:00Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebudastodio.com forward slash donate. Thank you and happy listening. We're all going to have different names for those glimpses or different ways to articulate our experience of them, whether it's joy or beauty or space, bandlessness or no self, emptiness. I had enough glimpses in meditation but also in the way that I was able to engage with people. So things that used to feel things I needed to right free from, there was this alchemical change happening. When I started to feel like I was moving towards something, I was moving towards a bit

1:00more joy, a bit more beauty, a bit more space. That felt very marked for me, that shift from moving away from suffering to moving towards joy or beauty. And it's not like that just happened once and now my whole life is moving towards joy and beauty. That's not how I experienced it actually and it's not like I'd never experienced suffering or confusion or disappointment or expectations and the disappointment that can come from disillusioned idealism. And yet there is something that has been glimpsed that I can't unsee, that I can't forget. I carried on practising and I was ordained two years ago and that was not as I expected it actually. I was very attached to the idea of what ordination was going to mean and what it was going to look like, that it meant that I was moving away from this old way of being and I was

2:00moving towards this new way of being that was going to be better, but it didn't feel like that, didn't look like that. And yeah, I was away on a three month retreat and there were quite intense experiences and glimpses of this beyond that I have felt and known in my body, though there were tough times on that retreat, definitely. I can't unlearn those things, I can't unsee those things. Even though things keep shifting and spiraling sometimes going back on itself, it's not a linear journey. There is an underlying current moving towards something bigger than myself, something less boundary. We hope you enjoyed today's Darmabite. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebudastodio.com forward slash Doni and thank you.