Becoming quiet allows for deeper listening – to the whispers of the body, heart and mind as parts of a whole and as harmonic convergence.
How we tune our instruments depends on what we hear. Skillful means provide a variety of tools to self prescribe and address what is needed in the moment. We’ll practice listening, attuning and harmonizing our body heart/mind with breath, sensing and knowing so that we might continue to navigate the landscapes we are in today.
This week’s theme is: Verses for the Day: Practising with the Dhammapāda . The Dhammapāda is one of the most ancient and best loved texts in the Buddhist tradition: a collection of verses that have been memorised and recited since the time of the earliest practitioners. Daily sessions this week will each centre on a particular stanza or group of stanzas from this timeless teaching. These will be our inspiration for reflection and meditation and a companion, if we wish, for the remainder of the day. Our Dharma Library thrives through collective generosity. Your donation helps sustain this offering for our entire community.
This week’s theme is: The Joy of Missing Out: Finding Happiness in Enoughness . Stepping out of the pressure to keep up, we turn toward the simple joys of presence, gratitude, and generosity. Together we explore how contentment and letting go can open the heart to a more quiet and sustainable happiness. Our Dharma Library thrives through collective generosity. Your donation helps sustain this offering for our entire community.
This week’s theme is: Identifying the Many Masks of the Inner Critic
Often we think of the inner critic as the constant nagging inner discourse which dismisses our good qualities, questions our lovability, and our potential for goodness. Being a master/mistress of disguise, the inner critic takes on many forms; it wraps our decision making process in veils of doubt, pushes us into compulsive activity, traps us in paralysis, and distorts our views on others.
Luckily, the Dharma path offers us tools to meet this painful heart-mind dynamic. This week we will practice summoning qualities like wisdom, kindness, equanimity, concentration, appreciation, compassion and inquiry, in order to meet our inner critic in a skilful way.
This week’s topic is “Letting Go. An Act of the Will?”
We pick up a hot coal in the morning from the wood burner.
Ouch, we let go immediately. No thought. No desire. Instant letting go.
The language of letting go has entered into the mind of the meditator.
It is often not a solution but an ambitious state of mind.
Letting go reveals an outcome of understanding.
We can tell ourselves a 1000 times we should let go and it’s to no avail.
The desire to let go shows we are not ready to let go.
We will explore the preparation for letting go and wise responses employing at times letting go.
Recorded :
“The truth is that you will never be absolutely safe. All things change constantly, even what is most precious. This is the angst of life, the price of being a conscious human being.” – Phillip Moffitt As a spiritual practitioner, you learn to see and accept “uncertainty” as a fact of life – even during…
Recorded :
Buddha-Dharma teachings offer unparalleled insight into Truth, both ultimate and relative. Yet many practitioners fall into the belief that regular meditation alone will lead to breakthrough experiences and liberation-reinforced by the image of Buddha sitting under the Bodhi Tree.True liberation requires more than mindfulness practice. It transforms our entire conditioning: our ethics, how we view…
This week’s topic is: Beginning to See More Possibilities.
The Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki, said: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” With a beginner’s possibilities we can release our heart’s wholesome aspirations. Let’s engender a beginners spirit, and manifest our innate potential for freedom and well-being: embodying a saint’s patience to start again; an adventurer’s openness to step out of constricted views; and a creative’s zeal to reimagine ourselves and our world”
Recorded :
To care for our lives, the lives of all beings and the earth is all at the heart of what it means to be a human being. Yet, speculating about the future, and tensing up in fearful anticipation of days to come, are not skillful expressions of care and wisdom. There is a better way….