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

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of Feb 21, 2022

    This week’s topic is: Deeply Rooted, Fully Alive. This week we will explore the profound, yet accessible teachings of equipoise and equanimity. One of the best images for this sensitive balancing relationship with all things is a deeply rooted and flexible tree in a windy storm. The tree, equipoised, does not resist the wind, bending and yielding to its force. Yet, well nourished from the root, it returns to noble uprightness as soon as the pressure passes.

    Read More

  • Yahel Avigur

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Yahel Avigur – Week of 14 July, 2025

    We’re delighted to have Yahel Avigur guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May these sessions enrich and support your practice.

    This week’s theme is: Metta — Healing All Aspects

    This week, we’ll open to the healing power of metta – loving-kindness, or goodwill – as a transformative force in our lives. We’ll practice offering this gentle warmth first to those we naturally care about, and to ourselves. Gradually, we’ll widen the circle, allowing metta to infuse our relationships with neutral people, those we find difficult, and ultimately all beings. As kindness suffuses more corners of our hearts and lives, we may begin to discover a growing sense of spaciousness and connection – and with it, insight, balance, and inner freedom.

    Our Dharma Library thrives through collective generosity. Your donation helps sustain this offering for our entire community.

    Read More

  • Shinzen Young

    How to structure your practice in life

    Recorded : March 25, 2018

    Shinzen guides you through his “See, Hear, Feel” focus technique. This technique is designed to be applicable in any life situation — driving a car, having a conversation, working out, puttering around the house…. After that he gives a dharma talk describing a systematic procedure for “monasticizing” daily life. The goal of this program is…

    Read More

  • Emily Horn

    The Phases of Insight

    Recorded : April 7, 2024

    Similar to the phases of the moon, our spiritual practice is full of natural rhythms and seasons. In this session we will learn a simple chart, called the phases of insight, that supports recognizing what can unfold at various points in meditation. By learning these patterns we can open our hearts with more confidence, and attune to…

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Zohar Lavie – Week of July 5, 2021

    This week’s theme is: The Power of Compassion.

    Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive. – Dalai Lama

    During this week we will explore how compassion informs and supports meditation practice and the deepening of understanding and wisdom. We will practice and inquire into different aspects of this powerful attitude and intention and taste for ourselves the impact it has on ourselves and the world.

    Read More

  •

    Cultivating Wise Energy

    Recorded : March 6, 2022

    Everything we do in life depends on energy, but the modern world has a destructive and exploitative relationship with energy. What is wise, balanced energy in spiritual practice? How can we establish this in the face of societal pressure and norms, and how can it be a resource in our daily life?

    Read More

  • Frank Ostaseski

    Tonight the Subject is Love

    Recorded : April 28, 2024

    Love is the essential quality needed for the journey through life. The heart’s desire for deep connection fuels the journey, inspires and deepens our practice. This is why at some point we stop practicing to get anywhere, or to achieve anything… we just practice because we love it. Link to the YouTube video that we were…

    Read More