Please offer Metta to Sangha participant, Mary Lee McManus, her husband Frank and her family. Mary Lee’s husband, Frank, is expected to die today and has been suffering from cancer for several years. May they be at ease during this difficult time.

Please join us Thursday evening for a memorial service for sangha member Chris Fuchs who passed away this past week. Chris lovingly served the Sangha in many ways. She cleaned and decorated the meditation hall. We owe the arrangement of our furnishings and decorations to her keen eye and artistic sensibilities. Chris created the beautiful greeting and note cards that are available in exchange for a gift of dana to the Sangha. She also showed her sense of humor in many ways. During her time of cleaning the meditation hall, Chris nicknamed the vacuum cleaner “Ajahn Vacuumo”, humorously acknowledging that all things are our teachers. She even showed up at one of our Uposatha Day celebrations dressed as Lotus the Clown!

Please join us in remembering Chris and supporting her family by attending the memorial service which will be officiated by Caron Leader and Mike Boren. It is Thursday May 5 at 7:00 pm at Browning Funeral Home, 738 Diamond Avenue in Evansville.

To give Sangha members the opportunity to attend, the Thursday evening sitting will be shortened to 30 minutes and there will be no Dhamma talk.

Members of the Mindful Heart Buddha Sangha were invited by Reverend Thich Hang Dat to be part of the celebration of the Buddha’s Birthday at Ten Thousand Buddhas Summit Monastery near Corydon, Indiana.  The Vietnamese, Burmese, Karen, and Sri Lankan communities of Louisville support this monastery and over a hundred attended the festivities.  We were given front row seats for the ceremony and fed very well.  The ceremony featured chanting in Vietnamese and a procession up to bathe the baby Buddha which symbolizes purifying the Buddha being born in ourselves.

    Many in our
sangha follow the Theravada tradition which practices vipassana (or insight
meditation.)  I recently read a helpful article by Buddhist scholar Reginald Ray in which he
defines the word vipassana.

Ray states that the word has two parts:  Passana, which indicates seeing and Vi, which when used as a prefex adds the meaning of extraordinary. Thus vipassana
means “seeing in an extraordinary way.”  It means to see things as they
truly are – without making things/life the way we want them to be. Just clear
awareness of Reality.

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The Sangha was established by Mary MacGregor. She began to have an interest in Buddhism after reading a book by Jack Kornfield in 1994. Mary then attended a retreat at the Insight Mediation Center in Barre, Mass., which led her to return to Evansville and begin offering silent meditation days once a month. Feeling that this was not enough practice, Mary began inviting people with similar interest to mediate weekly at her office. Later she traveled to France to attend a three-week retreat at Thich Nhat Hanh’s center in Plum Village and embarked on extensive individual study.

Continue reading »

The Sangha was established by Mary MacGregor. She began to have an interest
in Buddhism after reading a book by
Jack Kornfield in
1994. Mary then attended a retreat at the
Insight Mediation Center in Barre, Mass., which led her to return to
Evansville and begin offering silent meditation days once a month. Feeling that
this was not enough practice, Mary began inviting people with similar interest
to mediate weekly at her office. Later she traveled to France to attend a
three-week retreat at
Thich Nhat Hanh‘s center in Plum
Village and embarked on extensive individual study.

Continue reading »