Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nirmala Werner – Week of Apr 29 – 3 May, 2024
Nirmala Werner
We’re fortunate that Nirmala Werner has generously offered to lead our daily meditation sessions. To find out more about Nirmala, and to view her other contributions to Sangha Live, click here. Recordings will be posted by the end of the day of the live session.
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.
Today’s session is the second in a special run of three consecutive sessions with Martin, where he looks deeply at the nature of experience through Buddha’s profound descriptions of reality – Impermanence, Emptiness, Non self-existence. The classes point directly to how these themes can come alive in our practice and understanding, looking at the personal,…
Progress in meditation may be slower than we anticipate. Discouragement develops when the comparing mind holds unrealistic expectations, demands perfection, and craves for measurable progress, predictable results, or signposts of success. This talk explores the obstacle of discouragement and its roots in conceit and the comparing mind. To prevent discouragement, we develop skillful ways to…
Our heart’s experiences do not only affect our mental and emotional states. They also impact bodily experience, creating tension, tightness, spaciousness or ease. Likewise, our bodily experiences do not only generate physical sensations, but also inform and determine the energies of our heart. In this Sunday Sangha session, we will use qigong and meditation to…
This week’s theme is “Preparing the Heart and Mind”. In Buddhist practice we often hear we should let go. And often enough we would really like to let go of those thoughts, impulses, moods and contractions which keep us agitated and in unease. But letting go is rarely something we decide to do; and neither is holding on. In the upcoming week we will explore why the heart-mind holds on to something and how we can prepare, nourish and soothe it, so that letting go becomes a natural process, not a willful command.
Humans live in the spell of the self, as if it had substantial existence.
Dharma offers a reflection/meditation/inquiry into this phenomenon.
One who asks ‘Who Wakes Up?’ lives in the spell.
Teaching will offer ways to a non-intellectual realisation of emptiness of self.
Be devoted to this in daily life – until obvious as seeing colour for one with sound eyesight.
To wake up from the dream of self is liberating.
In this session author and communication trainer Oren Jay Sofer offered guidance and reflections on how to approach difficult situations like stress from the pandemic and conflict with family with more skill, clarity and compassion. (Please note that this live stream experienced some technical difficulties, so the recording has been edited accordingly.)
In this class we explore the practice of generosity, both in giving and receiving. We investigate how we can give and receive from our heart, with wisdom and discernment. We learn how to allow the three kinds of gifts–material resources, the gift of the Dharma, and the gift of non-fear–to flow abundantly through all aspects…