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

  • Dave Smith

    Citta and Right Speech: Cultivating the Voice of Kindness and Wisdom

    Dharma practice encourages us to transform our thoughts, words and actions. The primary mechanism for how this is accomplished is vague. What often goes unnoticed is that the use of the term mind has undergone a radical psychologization from the time of the Buddha into present day. During this session we will explore the many nuances of…

    Read More

  • Martine Batchelor

    What is this?

    In this session Martine leads a guided meditation on the question “What is this?”, and then explores this questioning practice as a means to encounter each moment with awareness and as a means of developing a stable and open heart.

    Read More

  • Love in the Time of Extinction: Dharma Practice and the Climate Emergency

    This was a special Worldwide Insight session in which Martin Aylward and Yanai Postelnik were in conversation about the climate emergency and how to engage with it from a Dharma perspective. Prior to the session, Yanai wrote: “I know there are many in our worldwide sangha, who like myself have engaged with, or are considering…

    Read More

  • Justine Dawson

    Comfortable with Discomfort: How to be a Bodhisattva

    Our current situation is giving us great practice with discomfort. whether we’re experiencing small inconveniences or significant disruption. Dharma teaches us that this very discomfort is a gateway to realization. Once our efforts to soothe or transcend run dry, we gain the opportunity to develop insight, freedom, and true bodhisattva compassion. Compassion that is at…

    Read More

  • Christelle Bonneau

    Nothing is my own, everything is my own.

    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…

    Read More

  • Shaila Catherine

    How Conduct Bears Fruit: Training in Not-Killing

    In this session Shaila Catherine explores the fruits of karma and the consequences of action through a detailed consideration of why and how we practice ethical precepts. The focus for this talk is the commitment to not kill.

    Read More