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Patrick Kearney's Dharma Talks at Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre
Patrick Kearney
Patrick has practised mindfulness meditation (satipaṭṭhāna vipassanā) since 1977. At that time there was little or no Buddhist meditation training available in Australia, so he spent years travelling in Asia and the USA working with teachers from different Buddhist traditions to learn the craft of meditation practice. Most of his training has been in the insight meditation lineage of Mahāsī Sayādaw of Burma, which included several years as a Buddhist monk. His main teachers were Sayādaw U Paṇḍita and John Hale. He has also trained in the Diamond Sangha lineage of Zen where his teachers have been Robert Aitken Rōshi and Paul Maloney Rōshi.
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2015-09-02 Tracking experience 1:11:54
We examine the central activity of satipaṭṭhāna, that of anupassanā, or “tracking” experience over time. We do this by unpacking the sentence, “Here a bhikkhu, surrendering longing and sorrow for the world, lives tracking body as body … feeling as feeling … heart/mind as heart/mind … phenomena as phenomena, ardent, clearly understanding and mindful.”
Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre Month Long Retreat led by Patrick Kearney
2015-09-02 Tracking the thought-stream 65:19
A fundamental principle of satipaṭṭhāna practice is to take what distracts us, what prevents us from practising, and make it our meditation object. Here we look at using the thought-stream as meditation object. We learn how to attend to the process of thinking rather than get caught up in the contents of our thoughts.
Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre Month Long Retreat led by Patrick Kearney
2015-09-01 On vedana 68:34
Here we explore the Buddha’s concept of vedanā, or feeling, more thoroughly. We see the intimate link between contact (phassa), the immediacy of experience, and feeling. All experience is already accompanied by feeling; or, we can say that we are already moved by this experience. We are moved toward holding by pleasant feeling (sukha vedanā), toward rejection by painful feeling (dukkha vedanā), or toward delusion by neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling (a-dukkha-(m)a-sukha vedanā). Feeling presents us with a world that we have already assessed as requiring response, and have already responded to.
Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre Month Long Retreat led by Patrick Kearney
2015-09-01 Tracking feeling 65:47
This morning we look at what the Buddha means by vedanā, or “feeling.” We begin with a meditation experiment and go on to explore what the role of affect in the Buddha’s teaching, and in our practice.
Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre Month Long Retreat led by Patrick Kearney
2015-08-31 Mindfulness of breathing 1:13:47
We look at the section in Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta where the Buddha speaks of mindfulness of breathing (ānāpāna-sati). We look at the development of the practice from natural awareness to mindfulness to understanding to training to sensing to calming, and we see how the nature of breathing itself transforms as our relationship to it develops.
Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre Month Long Retreat led by Patrick Kearney
2015-08-31 Tracking breathing 57:08
This morning we experiment in using breathing as a meditation object. How do we know we are breathing? We find movement in the body, air element (vayo dhātu). We practise precision in our mindfulness of breathing by tracking its location, its length, its shape or form, its clarity, its beginnings and ends. This opens up issues regarding both the nature of breathing and our relationship to breathing.
Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre Month Long Retreat led by Patrick Kearney
2015-08-30 The one-way street & nibbana - Introducing satipatthana 64:43
We introduce satipaṭṭhāna, the way of mindfulness. More than just a meditation technique, satipaṭṭhāna represents a way of practice that is a “one-way street” (ekāyana magga) leading direct to nibbāna. We examine the meaning of nibbāna, looking at it both cognitively and affectively. And we discuss the relationship between the practice of tracking experience over time, and nibbāna itself.
Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre Month Long Retreat led by Patrick Kearney
2015-08-30 Tracking elements 56:58
We begin by discussing our relationship to body, how we find ourselves alienated from the experience of body because of our habit of experiencing body from the outside, as it were. We experience our body through our mental images of our body; how we imagine it looks from the outside, rather than how it actually feels from the inside. Then we experiment with the four mahābhūta, or “great appearances,” earth element (pathavī dhātu), air element (vayo dhātu), fire element (tejo dhātu) and water element (āpo dhātu). These represent the elemental qualities of the body, as sensed from inside the body rather than imagined from beyond the body.
Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre Month Long Retreat led by Patrick Kearney
2015-08-29 Introducing mindfulness 31:45
We introduce the concept of “mindfulness,” which is the standard translation of the Pāli word sati. Sati literally means “memory,” and mindfulness refers to the act of remembering the present. We find the same meaning in railway station signs that exhort us to “Mind the gap,” to remember to be aware, now. The practice of mindfulness is associated with the felt continuity of awareness, and this is what we are aiming for in our practice.
Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre Month Long Retreat led by Patrick Kearney
2015-08-29 On meditation method 65:31
This morning we examine the nature of meditation itself, seeing it in terms of awareness, attention and method. We explore the nature of awareness, and how attention structures the field of awareness. From there, we look at issues in developing a meditation method.
Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre Month Long Retreat led by Patrick Kearney

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