Daily Meditation Recordings, with Sophie Boyer – Week of March 27, 2022
Sophie Boyer
We’re fortunate that Sophie Boyer has generously offered to lead our daily meditation sessions for Europe and the UK. To find out more about Sophie, and to view her other contributions to Sangha Live, click here.
Recordings are posted 24 – 36 hours after the live session runs.
This week’s topic is “Movement in Stillness“.
The flow of life is unpredictable, and its instability and the changes it presents often throw us off balance. The Buddha suggests adopting an approach where beauty and freedom can emerge at the center of this “movement in stillness.” Throughout this week, we will explore the challenges that arise when facing the realities of birth, life, and death, and how open, stable attention and clear perception can support a deeper understanding of the natural flow of all things.
Life seems an inevitable movement in the field of time until death interrupts. Amidst the myriad number of events, welcome and unwelcome, we hastily conclude the way we perceive reveals the way things are.
In the best of circumstances the path of life is a bumpy road. The practice of embodied presence opens the possibility to understand and transform our habits of dissatisfaction and distraction, and invites spaciousness and openness in our day-to-day lives. Becoming intimate, moment by moment, with living reality may expand our life-perspective and attune us…
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: Slow Down, Open Up: Ways Into Being Where You Already Are
Ukraine…Gaza…Iran… Can Buddhist teachings help us understand and respond to these modern conflicts? Quotation: If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil…
This week’s theme is Making Sense of Self.
Although the Buddha encourages us to not indulgently ponder whether the self is real or not, he did offer us a way to explore how the sense of self appears. This methodology, called the khandhas (aggregates: the heap of heaps), exposes all aspects we gather together to create and hold to our sense of self: form (body); vedanā (subtle preference); perception; saṅkhāra (mental formations – like intention, attention…); and consciousness (knowing).
What do you love? What’s your relationship to love? Do you love yourself? Do you love someone else? Do you love your job or your hobbies or your house or your friends or your community? Do you love the dharma or the truth or reality? What is Love? Beyond learning about what we love, what…