With Earth Day here, James reflects on the preciousness and generosity of our wonderful planet, the current situation of climate change and how our Dharma practice can help us transform despair into meaningful and inspiring action.
Discover more from the Dharma Library
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Daily Meditation Recordings, with Jaya Rudgard – Week of May 31, 2021
This week’s topic is “Rediscovering Simplicity: Renunciation and the Art of Letting Go”. Renunciation is one of the ten paramis or ‘spiritual perfections’ considered most conducive to happiness and wellbeing, and yet we tend to understand it in ways that are not helpful. How in the age of peak stuff and peak busyness can we recover the wisdom of “less is more” in a way that re-energises us, lightens our burdens and helps us rediscover creativity and flow? This week we’ll look at this question from different angles with some suggestions for taking the exploration from our morning practice into the activities of our day.
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Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nirmala Werner – Week of Dec 5 – 9, 2022
This week’s theme is “Embodied Meditation Practise & the Transformative Power of the 5 Precepts”.
Many people find themselves from time to time in a spiritual vacuum, trying to fill this emptiness with indulgence through eating, drinking, surfing the internet, shopping, pornography, doing drugs, etc.
This week we will look into the 5 precepts, which the Buddha recommended for anyone who wishes to live a peaceful life. The precepts can act as a training guideline, and can support us to stop, pause and look deeply into ourselves to understand, “What is really going on here?” as a fundamental part on our way to universal love, compassion and liberation.
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Cultivating mindfulness of sounds and meditative listening.
Recorded :
February 8, 2015 Worldwide Insight talk from Martine Batchelor: “Cultivating Mindfulness of Sounds and Meditative Listening”. Guided meditation, Dharma talk and Q&A.
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Daily Meditation Recordings, with Ulla Koenig – Week of 13 October, 2025
We’re delighted to have Ulla Koenig guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May these gatherings enrich your practice.
This week’s theme is: Metta in Action
To be met with metta is to be received with basic respect and a sense of intrinsic worth-simply because we exist. It’s not something we earn or measure; it’s a fundamental recognition of our being. This week, we explore how to extend such warmth toward ourselves. And we’ll look at how metta supports accountability, nurtures integrity, and helps us respond to criticism with clarity and compassion-opening the door to deeper self-understanding and genuine growth.
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Resting in Receptivity – Opening Up to What Liberates
Recorded :
September 18, 2022 This session is an embodied, compassionate exploration through our body-mind-heart into life. The door is open. What we long for is already there. This practise invites you to undo and deeply rest into the wonder of an receptive presence. BY LAL DED, TRANSLATED BY JANE HIRSHFIELD:I was passionate,filled with longing,I searchedfar and wide. But the…
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Cultivating self-compassion
Recorded :
May 21, 2017 So many of us struggle with self-hatred and self-judgment. Self-compassion is so deeply needed in these times, and brings together mindfulness, loving kindness practices, and a recognition of our shared humanity. This session explores the cultivation of this core set of practices.
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The Relative is the Absolute: Touching Race, Injustice, and Love
Recorded :
October 7, 2018 When we engage in the distortion that the relative plane is separate from the absolute – that it is something to transcend or ‘just an illusion’ – we ignore the reality of the illusion. When we know ourselves as a whole which subsumes everything, we cease to diminish or dismiss the mystery of being human….
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The Necessity of Trust
Recorded :
May 28, 2023 The qualities of trust, faith, and confidence are essential for mental health, profound spiritual explorations and the depth of relationships. To serve well, trust needs cultivating in conjunction with qualities of discerning wisdom and conscious intention. This session explores how this can be encouraged in both meditation and in our heart’s countless daily actions.
Discussion