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

Search Sangha Live

As wide as life and as open as space: practicing inclusivity.

With Martin Aylward recorded on March 22, 2015.

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

As we get familiar with the practice of meditation and the language of Dharma teachings, we can find ourselves getting comfortable, even complacent. Yet our practice in many ways is designed to make us uncomfortable! Designed to keep us open to ambiguity and uncertainty, to invite us to question and explore rather than to settle for answers or beliefs.

Martin explores different ways to keep our practice fresh, to stay open to what is actually happening, to maintain our curiosity about this remarkable and mysterious business of being human. We explore what it means to practice being inclusive in different realms – meditative, relational, social and cultural.

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

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • The freeing of human consciousness: from seeing the world ‘out there’, separate and alien, to directly knowing, feeling, and living the intimacy of all things

    Recorded : February 18, 2018

    The Shurangama Sutra, which points out the foundations of Zen practice, discusses the essential nature of mind as the “primal essence of consciousness that brings forth all conditions.” Implied is the heart-mind (citta) both profoundly intimate with all things while at the same time free and independent of all things. How is it to live…

    Read More

  • Leslie Booker

    The Delusion of Separateness

    Recorded : October 27, 2019

    There seems to be a sense of disorientation, disjointedness and overall running around in circles happening in the world today. And for some reason, many of us think that we’re the only ones who are feeling it; as if it’s our own personal failing. As we move into the changing of seasons, this is the…

    Read More

  •

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Jaya Rudgard – Week of July 24, 2023

    This week’s theme is “Meditations on the Five Great Elements of Nature”. The five elements or energetic properties of nature (earth, water, fire, wind and space) feature frequently in the Buddha’s teaching and are a wonderful support for meditation and insight. This week we will practice with these elements as skilful means for contemplating body and world, and for cultivating the mind.

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    Trust in the Goodness of your Practice

    Recorded : January 26, 2020

    Basic goodness is the fundamental ground of your own heart and mind and being. A buoyant heart allows us to face the ‘infinite ocean of suffering’ and stay open-hearted; It is the foundation for living the Bodhisattva vows, it is how we keep on waking up and showing up and growing up, for the benefit…

    Read More

  •

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Ulla Koenig – Week of Sept 12, 2022

    This week’s topic is (Be)Come As You Are. Our driven-ness, our ruminating thoughts, and our feelings of shame, guilt, and anxiety never allow us to simply ‘be’. They evolve around a sense of identity , a process the Buddha called selfing (bhava), a form of suffering (dukkha). We are endlessly trapped in a narrative of who we think we ought to be, were in the past and should be in the future.

    We will dedicate our shared time together to build an awareness of these processes and find alternative ways to relate to the many experiences of life.

    Read More