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These sessions were recorded in the Montreal Area during Spring workshops 2007
 The conventional approach to happiness is to do what you like and avoid what you don’t, but if you’ve chosen meditation as a lifestyle, you’ve realized that pleasure and pain, happiness and suffering, success and failure, are each two sides of a coin. You can’t have one without the other.
The ultimate goal of meditation is to step out of this cyclic pattern of seeking one thing and sooner or later ending up with its opposite. We abandon our almost instinctive trust in dualistic thought, cease the inner dialogue and put an end to conditioned behavior. In a word, it’s about stopping.
Which brings us to the rather surprising metaphor of the path. Whereas paths lead elsewhere, the need to stop implies that we’re already there. The image is as paradoxical as life itself.
The process of meditation is an unloading of mental excess, but it’s also a reaffirmation of mental strength and insight. Gaining access to our full potential doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The eight aspects of a path are perspective, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration. By recalling them we cultivate peace, discipline and insight. At the same time we find the wherewithal to change. Without taking these steps to change, we hang on tight to what’s familiar, even when we know it’s harmful. The courage to let go comes from an appropriate sense of right and wrong, and the will to align our behavior with what we know.
Letting go leads us from complication and confusion to simplicity and clarity, in which sense it’s a path. However, identification of the eight aspects is a personal process that depends on constant reflection, self-questioning and honesty. A path is not simply a formula prescribed by an ancient tradition, it must be brought to life in a personal way that begins at the place you find yourself, here and now.
This eightfold path brings insight into the true nature of reality – one of the two wings of enlightenment. The other wing – compassion – brings superlative balance. This isn’t just a warm, fuzzy feeling but a change of heart to complement your change of mind, an empathy for others that’s at once humbling and enriching. When the wing of empathic love is balanced by the wing of insight, we transcend mere good will towards others. This combination becomes an engine of change and a source of happiness that’s firmly seated in reality.
Stephen Schettini
Hudson, Quebec
June 2007
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