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.
The world is unsteady and chaotic. We find ourselves struggling in a pandemic that has completely disrupted our lives. Many of us are being confronted with the reality of death in a way we thought we never would. In the face of all this, it is hard to maintain our physical and emotional balance. Resiliency…
This week’s topic is “The Changeless. Knock, knock on Heaven’s Door”. Conventional human experience reveals the subject and the object. The object includes, mind/body/things/world/time/space and here and now. All of these are subject to change. The subject includes consciousness, perception, awareness, attention, mindfulness, I and my. All subject to change. We might conclude true reality reveals change. Can realisation of the changeless make easy the navigation of change?
Shinzen guides you through his “See, Hear, Feel” focus technique. This technique is designed to be applicable in any life situation — driving a car, having a conversation, working out, puttering around the house…. After that he gives a dharma talk describing a systematic procedure for “monasticizing” daily life. The goal of this program is…
Dharma teachings are sublime, subtle, and onward leading: they are always going deeper and wider than we may first presume. Yet, they also meet us where we are, in the midst of our life. In this session we’ll explore two expressions of the middle-way we can cultivate and develop in our practice and in our…
In this talk Dave discusses the process of integrating heart practices within the four foundations of mindfulness. Mindfulness practice unites the steadiness of concentration with the immediacy of moment to moment experience. As we learn to collect the body and mind, intuitive wisdom arises. This allows us to open to the truth of each moment’s…
This week’s theme is “Nurturing a Long View and Living Now”. It takes a lot of heart and presence to live a satisfying and meaningful life. Our inner patterns of resistance and reactivity often make us short sighted and contracted, and yet we have the potential to live from a timeless presence and embody beautiful human qualities such as wisdom, care, passion and originality. How can you make your time on earth something beautiful to behold? How can you live now with zest, courage, and love? How can you be a good ancestor for the ones that will live 100,000 years from now?
This week’s topic is A Sense of Essence. In his teachings the Buddha utilised the liberating yet frequently misunderstood concept of karma. Karma refers to how an action is carried out rather than the outcome of that action. This helps shift us away from a fixed self-view, on which we frequently pass judgment, and toward a freeing examination of activities. Asking us to inquire, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term well-being and happiness?”