Beginning Again
Dear Friends,
We’re Beginning A Monthly Online Sangha.
We’ve been sitting with the question of how to gather. And we kept arriving at the same answer: simply. Begin.
First Sundays online, every month, 5:00–6:15 pm ET/ 2:00-3:15 PT. A sit. A short reflection. A question or two. Sometimes both of us, sometimes one of us, sometimes a guest teacher or a student voice we’re grateful to make room for. Humble beginnings, not a disclaimer. The whole idea.
Beginning again, April 5th. We’d love to have you there.Full details and registration at heartstreamsangha.com.
There’s a moment right before you press “join.”
The meeting is open. Your name is in the waiting room. You can still close the tab and nobody would know.
Most of us have been in that moment. Not just with Zoom. With practice itself. With returning to something we set down, a sitting routine, a relationship, a version of ourselves we’d given up on. The hand hovers. The cursor blinks. And then, sometimes, we click.
That click, that beginning again, is our whole dharma practice.
The Buddha left us a short teaching on this:“Appamado amatapadaṃ: Heedfulness is the path to the deathless.” The word he used in Pali, “appamada,” means literally “not losing the thread.” These are among the opening words of the Dhammapada, one of the oldest collections of the Buddha’s teachings, and they set the tone for everything that follows.
So every time we notice the thread has slipped from our hands, and we pick it up again, we are on the path to liberation. The act of beginning again is sacred and powerful. It is the practice in action, and every time we feel that sense of beginning again we can know we are not losing the thread..
When the mind wanders, and it will, it always does, we notice, and we return. No verdicts or score keeping. Just the noticing, and then the quiet turn back toward the breath, toward the body, toward what is actually here.
What takes most of us years to really believe is that wandering isn’t the problem. The mind moves toward pleasure, away from discomfort, into memory, into planning, into the story it’s been running since before you sat down. This is just the nature of a mind that gets called back to practice, that can enter into the sacred act of beginning again.
Before his own awakening, the Buddha sat with this same mind. The account of his practice is in the Dvedhavitakka Sutta. He noticed which thoughts led toward suffering and which led toward freedom, and patiently, again and again, turned back toward what was wholesome. He was not a being above the struggle. A being inside it, working with what he had, returning every time he drifted. Making the return itself the practice.
The world we live in often tells us a different story. It rewards the seemingly unbroken. It treats the need to begin again as evidence of weakness, the need to return as proof that you didn’t belong in the first place. Some of us know what it is to lose the thread and not have chosen to. The world called it falling behind. The Dharma has always said otherwise.
They begin. They make the effort.
This is the path.
Beginning again is not a clean slate. It’s the practice of refusing numbness, of not turning away from this moment, from each other, or from whatever this life is asking us to hold right now. That’s what we come together to do.
That’s what Heartstream is built for.
From Our Lives
Devin:
I think about the year I worked the floor at an aircraft assembly plant in Wichita Kansas. Long shifts, repetitive motion, the same procedures on the same aircraft day after day. There was a quality check built into the work…you’d complete a section, sign off, and start the next one clean. No carry-over. Whatever you’d botched in the last sequence didn’t follow you into the next. The work demanded that you put it down and begin again. Again and again and again.
Well into “the early years” there were long gaps in my practice. Seasons where I rarely sat or infrequently sat, lived more at the surface than the depth. And the returning was never dramatic. It was just, I sat down. The breath was there. I’d been gone, and the breath had been waiting, patient as anything, and when I came back it didn’t ask me where I’d been.
That’s what the practice is. Not the sitting. The coming back.
Tara:
Years before Heartstream, before retreats and teacher training and any of the formal containers I now help hold, I was just someone who wanted to practice with other people and didn’t quite know how to make that happen.
But I stepped into the unknown, first joining a local sangha, Mission Dharma, led by Howie Cohn. I started volunteering to be of service and to feel more connected to sangha. Joy, gratitude, and dharma friendship flowed from those decisions. That experience never left me. Years later, when I helped found SF BIPOC sitting group with my colleague Victoria Cary, I felt the same uncertainty at the beginning…Who would come? Would it hold? Were the conditions right yet?. They weren’t. They never quite are. But people came. And they kept coming. And what I learned, sitting in those circles, is that a group doesn’t begin when the conditions are perfect. It begins when someone decides the longing is larger than the fear.
That’s what we’re doing now. Again.
You don’t have to have it together to begin. That’s not the instruction.
The Dhamma, the Buddha left us is sandiṭṭhiko, akāliko, ehipassiko, his own description of the teaching, repeated throughout the early discourses: visible here and now, immediate, inviting one to come and see. Not requiring that we arrive perfectly prepared. Not asking that we have our act together before we approach. Just come. See.
Begin again.
With love,
Tara and Devin The Heartstream Sangha
taramulay.com | devinberry.org
The stream keeps moving.
First Sundays — online, every month, 5:00–6:15 pm ET. A sit. A short reflection. We’d love to have you there. Full details and registration at heartstreamsangha.com.
Cambridge Insight, July 12 - Heartstream Daylong, hybrid, with Tara & Javier Cruz. Details and Registration
Insight & Metta retreat with Tara Mulay, Devin Berry & Hakim Tafari (Qi Gong) Big Bear Retreat Center, CA. Sept 27th - Oct 1st. Details and Registration
Heartstream month residency: The Forest Refuge, July 2027 details in September
Other upcoming offerings from each of us: taramulay.com | devinberry.org
Thank you I will be there online