Daily Meditation Recordings, with Martin Aylward – Week of January 11, 2021
Martin Aylward
We’re fortunate that Martin Aylward has generously offered to lead our daily meditation sessions for Europe and the UK. To find out more about Martin, and to view his other contributions to Sangha Live, click here.
Our current situation is giving us great practice with discomfort. whether we’re experiencing small inconveniences or significant disruption. Dharma teaches us that this very discomfort is a gateway to realization. Once our efforts to soothe or transcend run dry, we gain the opportunity to develop insight, freedom, and true bodhisattva compassion. Compassion that is at…
Gregory writes: “The early Buddhist vision of the arahat ideal is sometimes taken to imply that individual awakening is the sole aim of the Path whereas the later Buddhist vision of the bodhisattva ideal centers on the liberation of all beings. The gap between practice aimed at solitary awakening and practice aimed at liberation of…
One of the Buddha’s primary realisations was ‘Life is painful and then you die.’ If this is true, then how do we respond to the difficulties of life? This session will explore how we are conditioned to protect, promote and satisfy a ‘self’ which can never be satisfied because ‘we are the slaves of craving.’ There will…
His Holiness the Dalai Lama has shared that compassion is not a luxury but a necessity for human beings to survive. There is no more important time to understand and strengthen compassion than right now.
Eros is life force, the energy that animates our being. Eros fills our spiritual life with vitality, our minds with creativity, our ideas with embodiment and our relating with rich intimacy. To live full lives we need access to eros; without it we become dry, rigid, flacid and withholding. Yet what place does it have…
The Buddha invited us to investigate our experience moment by moment. One of the key things we uncover as we do this is that separation is an illusion, and that we are deeply interwoven and interconnected with all beings and all things. This week we will disentangle the habitual knots of isolation and ignorance and open to the freedom available as we open our exploration of inter-being.
Samadhi is the art of nourishing, gathering, and collecting the heart. Highly regarded by the Buddha, this practice relies on honesty and wisdom, reliably leading to joy and happiness, and inclines the heart towards the depth of the path. In this session, we will open a door to cultivating this skill.
We’re honored to have Martin Aylward offering our Daily Meditation sessions this week. We hope they are nourishing for your practice. This week’s theme is: Basic Sanity: Steadiness, Openness and Love