Use code SUMMERPRACTICE for a 25% discount on all On Demand Courses through August 31.

Dharma, Desire and Eros

With Justine Dawson recorded on May 9, 2021.

Found our teachings useful? Help us continue our work and support your teachers with a donation. Here’s how.

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 in dharma practice? Traditional teachings caution us when it comes to desire, and the erotic is rarely mentioned in a positive light. This Sunday we’ll explore how to engage eros and desire in a deepening practice of insight and understanding, one that is rooted in the body and in service to life.

Listen to the audio version below, or click here to download the mp3.

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings with Nathan Glyde – Week of January 29, 2024

    This week’s topic is “Getting A Feel For Feeling”. As we perceive, we add a feeling (vedanā) to our experience. When we are unaware of this process and react to the projected feeling, it causes unnecessary suffering (dukkha). However, understanding this process and responding skilfully leads to one of the deepest senses of freedom available. Let’s explore this freedom through our daily meditations this week.

    Read More

  • Shinzen Young

    How to structure your practice in life

    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…

    Read More

  • Vimalasara Mason-John

    Breath as Medicine

    Join us for our first Sunday Sangha session of the year on January 5th with Vimalasara Mason-John, inviting us to breathe into the new year with equanimity. It was through the potency of the breath that Prince Siddhartha became awake. It’s said that at the time of enlightenment, the Buddha was practicing anapanasati, the mindfulness…

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    The Wisdom of No Escape

    Our lives include facing things we didn’t choose, and often cannot change; such as getting ill or injured, or loosing something or someone that we love. Dharma teachings invite us to turn towards these, instead of turning away from them. What is the wisdom that is available to us when we meet our experience with…

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    Don’t be realistic. Be real

    Through the cultures within family, education and work, we are constantly orientated towards ‘realistic’ expectations and visions for our lives. Dharma practice asks us to abandon the realistic in favour of the real; listening deeply to life and to how things actually are, so as to respond wisely and lovingly, fully and freely. In this…

    Read More

  • Refuge, resilience and response in uncertain times

    By now, we can consciously acknowledge that our planetary state of emergency and ineffectual political response is impacting and fast changing our Dharma curriculum. We are being mercilessly shaken awake while at the same time facing overwhelming uncertainties. In this session, Thanissara explores how the Dharma, its practices and guidelines, can come to our aid…

    Read More

  • Nina la Rosa

    Dismantling Racism in Our Minds and Hearts

    If one lives as a human on this earth one is affected by racism. Power and privilege have been unfairly awarded throughout history to certain groups of people based on race while disempowering others. These systems function on a systemic and cultural level, but also within each of us individually when we unconsciously internalize messages…

    Read More