Use code SUMMERPRACTICE for a 25% discount on all On Demand Courses through August 31.

The Jewel of Sangha: We all need Community, Support and Love

With Martin Aylward recorded on September 15, 2019.

Found our teachings useful? Help us continue our work and support your teachers with a donation. Here’s how.

Martin writes: “Sangha is about community, support and love; it is one of the 3 jewels (Buddha-Dharma-Sangha) of our practice. But in the individualistic cultures and atomised structures in which many of us live, sangha too often gets inadequate attention. This is especially true in the Vipassana / Insight meditation tradition, because while silent meditation retreats give us a deep sense of community support while the retreat lasts, they do not help foster ongoing supportive friendships. You need to talk to people for that!

We are collectively facing precipitous ecological degradation, political polarisation and existential threats to life on earth. Fostering the mutual support and understanding of real community is vital. We have to live together. Community gives us belonging and love, strength and support. Spiritual community, local community, community of affinity; we need and long to be seen, valued and understood by those we live with.

Worldwide Insight is soon to undergo a major upgrade to its style, its focus and its offerings. Sangha will be at the heart of how we offer teachings and support all of you who attend, and this Sunday, I’ll be at Worldwide Insight with y’all, to explore sangha. Together.

We’ll look at ways to foster depth of community, support and friendship. We’ll look at opportunities for connection with other practitioners as well as with our neighbours and with those in need whom we may be able to support. We’ll look at some of the inner obstacles and defences which can stop us opening up to others, and we’ll make time for some rich discussion. Together.

Join me today. To meditate, reflect and explore. Together.

With love
Martin”

Listen to the audio version below, or click here to download the mp3.

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Toby Sola

    The Out Breath: Unlocking Concentration

    Shodo Harada Roshi is known as a “teacher of teachers”, with masters from various lineages coming to sit with him in Japan. If you went to Harada’s monastery, the main meditation technique you’d learn involves slowing the out breath to last one minute. This drastically slows down your physiology, which in turn settles the mind.

    Read More

  • Sitting with Pointlessness – Living with Potentiality

    During a recent retreat, the teachers’ instruction was to hold the question ‘What is this?’ in mind. While sitting on the cushion, the thought struck me that my life is futile! I am genetically programmed for survival and sex; everything else is just distracting window-dressing. This talk will explore the journey from the apparent ‘futility’…

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Zohar Lavie – Week of May 6, 2024

    This week’s topic is “Finding Balance in the Midst of Uncertainty”. Dharma teachings support us in meeting the wholeness of our lives with interest, gentleness and creativity. Acknowledging the inconstancy and flux of our experience, both joys and sorrows, with sensitivity and care nourishes a deep wellbeing. Through the week we will cultivate a nurturing environment through which to connect with challenging aspects of the human condition. By prioritising spacious tenderness over contraction and demand, we can find the liberation of the true heart’s release.

    Read More

  • The Beauty of Being

    Leela says: “Over the years my interest in awakening has be reformulated as how to be a real human being. In this session I invite you to explore, with me, the possibility of being grounded in the natural goodness of being. We will inquire how to live a full life from the ground of presence,…

    Read More

  • Nothing is reliable outside liberation.

    Practice places emphasis on seeing impermanence. Such a practice easily becomes habitual to the degree we miss the point. There is nothing reliable owing to impermanence. There is nothing we can depend upon in this world of mentality and materiality, inner and outer. If we abide deeply clear about this, the stress and fears fade…

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    Pathways to Happiness

    Being human includes feeling great and feeling pain; given the changing nature of experience what kind of happiness is possible for us? Can we cultivate freedom, happiness and contentment that are less reliant on things ‘going our way’? The attitudes of goodwill, care and friendliness are some of our greatest allies in practice, and also…

    Read More