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

  • Awakening to the New Year: creating conscious intentions

    When we move on behalf of the recognition of our true nature, a conscious intention becomes a way to align all aspects of our lives with our deepest understanding and recognition of truth. A conscious intention is seeped in possibility. While it may even look similar on some level, on the surface, to a conditioned…

    Read More

  • Is there compassion for the self? Go deep. Is compassion the end of self?

    The Dharma flies with two wings – compassion and wisdom. Compassion emerges from a liberated wisdom. That happens when constructs in the mind lose their significance. The emptiness of self and the emptiness of dependency on feeling tones take priority. This talk also explores the contraction of compassion into self interest. The liberation of compassion…

    Read More

  • Wisdom and compassion in our relationships: two sides of the same coin.

    Wisdom and compassion are two wonderful qualities that grow in us as our practice deepens. Diving into each one and into the inseparable nature of the two reveals the way in which they support and give rise to one another, and the way they manifest in our relationships: with ourselves, with others, with the world….

    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

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    Warrior heart: transforming anger into strength, dynamism and creativity

    Dharma teachings point to how dangerous and destructive anger is, and how words and actions can cause great suffering. This class looks at skilful means for meeting and exploring anger, and for understanding and transforming it. Martin leads a specially oriented meditation, and his talk explores the inner strength and confidence which can arise from…

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Zohar Lavie – Week of October 18, 2021

    This week’s theme is: The Abundant Middle-Way.

    The Buddha in his last steps of awakening turned away from austerities and the practiced hardships he had endured. He did not turn back to the indulgences of his youth, but uncovered a kind and sensitive middle-way between a sense of self-importance and self-negation. The awakened one then invited others to a way of living between common extremes of views, states, and habitual actions.

    This week we will walk the path of peace supporting the deep well-being and boundless heart of the middle-way.

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    Light on the path: pleasure, joy, fulfilment and free-ness.

    Our founding and guiding teacher Martin Aylward reflects on the importance of being nourished and uplifted by our practice. He looks at the nature of happiness and our sometimes difficult relationship with pleasure; explore opening up to joy, and point to ways in which dharma practice is fulfilling and freeing.

    Read More

  • Acting on Behalf of Consciousness

    As we move into this new year, most of us are ready to leave 2020 behind. So much hardship, for so many, has arisen in the last year. Many of us felt more isolated, more separate, than ever before. As we transition into 2021, rather than live and act on behalf of that felt sense…

    Read More