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.
Recordings are posted 24 – 36 hours after the live session runs.
Recorded :
What does it mean to bring the world into the heart? In these divided times, for those of us practicing peace, for those of us dedicated to liberation, we’ve been offered a grand opportunity to accept what we haven’t been willing to accept. To give what we haven’t been able to give. To love what…
This week’s topic is “Mindfulness of the nervous system: transforming fear, struggle and separation into love and connection”. We humans are social animals and need each other to feel safe and secure, to grow and to nourish ourselves. How can we live with a sense of connection, loving-kindness, and inner family? Our meditation practice allows us to take a break between stimulus and response. When we come into contact with our loved ones, we all too easily lose the inner freedom we think we have achieved and avoid our difficulties, also called spiritual bypassing. This week we explore what supports us to react flexibly to the internal and external world, to relax and to allow closeness and real intimacy. We will look into the first foundation of mindfulness, mindfulness of the body, including harmonizing the body formations and nervous system to meet our difficulties with gentleness.
This week’s theme is: Going Gently Through the Dark
A week of practice together, navigating both the darkness of winter and the inner states that can also feel dark, barren, wintry. A week of meditation and of community, of teachings and practice, or reminding ourselves of the preciousness and the possibilities of a flourishing human life.
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This week’s theme is: Bringing the Practice to Life. The Buddha’s teachings emphasise the whole of our lives as a rich ground for exploration and growth. Through meditation, we cultivate skills and ways of relating that can be applied beyond formal meditation. This week we will explore bringing the practice to different areas and aspects of our lives. We will open to taste how this enlivens and rejuvenates our practice, and how it can nurture wellbeing for others and ourselves.
Recorded :
It’s a pretty delicate task to find the right posture inside ourself in relation to the events that occur in our everyday life. Some are really desired and welcome; some are unexpected or disappointing. We gain things, we lose things and people, and good health comes and goes. On the one hand, everything we experience…
Recorded :
This weekend is the Buddhist full moon ritual known as Māgha Pūjā, one of the three great festival days in the Theravāda Buddhist calendar, also known as “Saṅgha Day,” celebrating the spiritual community. The tradition remembers a day when the first 1,250 arahant (fully awakened) disciples all spontaneously returned from their travels and came together with the…
This week’s topic is Subtilising Experience. The Dharma is a path to awakening. Our experience becomes more liberated as we awaken. Similarly, we can notice that our life progresses from the gross to the more subtle in awakening. A path of awakening freedom, then, is a path of subtilising: from perceptions of self and things in the world to space-time and even awareness, all phenomena transition from rigid and gross to fluid and refined, all the way to barely here at all.
Recorded :
So often we struggle because we’re resisting, fixing, changing, or even “transcending” our experiences. What shifts when instead of pushing our emotions away, we invite them closer in? What changes when we learn to relate to our emotions like a welcoming friend? And, what changes when we are able to access the place in which…