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

Change the story, change your life

With Brian Dean Williams recorded on June 25, 2017.

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

We live our lives through stories – about the world, and about ourselves. You may have noticed these stories surfacing in awareness in your meditation practice. We often cling to these stories as being “true”, yet holding this wrong view conceals that these stories are impermanent, cause suffering, and ultimately, are not personal.

In this session, we have the chance to explore how some ideas from narrative therapy might inform our Buddhist practice, and help to liberate us from the constraints of stories that cause suffering, and to re-author ourselves into stories of liberation. Meditation, instruction, and discussion as a global online community will help us down this path.

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

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Human Body – Earth Body – One Body

    The Earth speaks to us through our bodies. By contemplating the elements we come to understand that all life on Earth is simply interbeing. Through this sensed understanding we begin to transform human supremacy into human response-ability, a deepening of our inborn capacity for a healthy regenerative relationship with ourselves and our world. Quote: The…

    Read More

  • Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison

    Wake up to your Life: Cultivating Courage & Compassion in the Everyday

    Awakening to Life means harmonizing our values and our actions. Many of us merely go through the motions, sleepwalking through the hours, without actually feeling alive. Cultivating courage and joy entails slowing down, paying close attention, and practicing being fully engaged with what each moment has to offer. Koshin Sensei will share Zen teachings and…

    Read More

  • Monastic Practice, The Inner Way, and Contemporary Culture

    Monasticism and the practice of the Inner Way are being transformed by contemporary culture. What is the ‘Way’ today? Is there such a thing as a ‘Natural-Way-of-Being’? And what is ‘Enlightenment’? In this talk, we will explore these questions, and how to…

    Read More

  • The First Teaching: Radical Medicine for a Painful World

    The July full moon marks Dhamma Day (Āsāḷha Pūjā), the anniversary of the Buddha’s very first teaching, given to five friends in a deer park 2,614 years ago. This one ancient talk is said to contain the entire path. And it still asks something…

    Read More

  • Willa Blythe Baker

    Loving Awareness: Finding Freedom Within

    “This thing person called “me”, the one who is sensing, thinking and perceiving right now….who or what is it? This is an age old question that the traditions of the East, especially Buddhism and Hinduism, have held as the heart of their traditions. The answer to that question, in some scriptures, is “awareness”, a part of us that is already wakeful, attentive, open, free and loving. In this Sunday teaching, we consider what it means to encounter awareness, and why it might be important, not only for our practice of meditation, but for the fulfilment of our life’s purpose.

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    Practicing for the love of it.

    Before the session Martin wrote: “A Burmese teacher once told a friend of mine to always enjoy his practice. We love meditation in theory, and we want to grow and transform, and we certainly would like to be liberated from our suffering. And yet! We easily turn meditation into a chore, and feel discouraged by…

    Read More

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of 08 September, 2025

    We’re delighted to have Nathan Glyde leading our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May these sessions support and deepen your practice.

    This week’s theme is: Radiant Non-Reactivity

    Disentangling from the web of stress and distress is like meeting life with an open palm. This liberation shines with unequalled radiance and unfolds into the profound peace that our hearts and the world deeply long for.

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

    Read More

  • Practice as a Way of Remembrance

    Many are referring to this time as apocalyptic. Fair enough. It can seem as though everywhere we turn a dismantling of some sort is in the works. While we might intellectually feel able to embrace the change upon us, for many it can be easy to fall into overwhelm, hopelessness, even despair. What do the…

    Read More