Sundays 9.30am-12pm, October 7- November 11

Here in Portsmouth we're spending Fall and early Winter exploring Spiritual Receptivity as part of our year-long exploration of what it means to have a rounded approach to the Dharma – and how we might live more in alignment with it. It's been sweet as an apple to sit each week with our experience, cooling off after the heat of summer. And now it's time to start to mulch down with the many-colored leaves that have blown our way this year...

For our next series of Sunday community gatherings we'll be taking a hearty autumnal walk through the traditional Dharma teaching of The Five Skandhas, which observes and clarifies five modes of experience and so has something to say about how we perceive things, how we process what comes our way, and how we then make up a world we move through (or how the world makes us up!).

We'll begin with looking at form as an aspect of experience, and then move each week through the rest of this deceptively simple list of what makes up a person: feeling, perception, volition, consciousness. We'd love you to join us for some warm sangha mornings going deeper in good company while the winds blow around us in New England!

More resources on the Five Skandhas

Listen to Dharma talks on the Five Skandhas

Āryāvalokiteśvaro bodhisatvo gambhīrāṃ prajñāpāramitā-caryāṃ caramāṇo vyavalokayati sma pañca-skandhāṃs tāṃś ca svabhāvaśūnyān paśyati sma.
 

Practising the deep perfect understanding, noble Avalokiteśvara the bodhisatva examined the five branches of experience and saw that they lacked essence.

Jayarava's translation of the Heart Sutra