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

Search Sangha Live

Embracing Ambiguity: In What we Believe, How we Love and Who we Think we Are

With Martin Aylward recorded on July 7, 2019.

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

“Things are not as they seem, and nor are they otherwise” – Lankavatara Sutra.

We easily get seduced by certainty – thinking we really know what we want, what we believe, and who we think we are.

Yet Dharma teachings invite us to hold experience lightly, without reducing our knowing to narrow certainty; retaining a genuinely open mind. Today’s session with Worldwide Insight Founding teacher Martin Aylward will explore how dharma practice can help us stay with this sacred ’not-knowing’. Martin will discuss how we can be both looser and freer in relating to self, other and world, and how a nuanced and flexible mind helps navigate a world where the seeming certainties of ‘right and wrong’ easily divide us from each other.

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

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Zohar Lavie

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Zohar Lavie – Week of June 3, 2024

    This week’s topic is “Letting Go, Cultivating Deep Peace”. The Buddha’s teachings offer a profoundly pragmatic, compassionate and wise response to the human condition. During this week we will explore the art of pausing, looking deeply into our own lived experience and letting go of clinging, as foundations for developing a peaceful heart. This supports the possibilities for both our own well-being, as well as peace in the external world.

    Read More

  •

    Cultivating Wise Energy

    Recorded : March 6, 2022

    Everything we do in life depends on energy, but the modern world has a destructive and exploitative relationship with energy. What is wise, balanced energy in spiritual practice? How can we establish this in the face of societal pressure and norms, and how can it be a resource in our daily life?

    Read More

  • Eugene Cash

    The Paradox of Being: Alive & Aware

    Recorded : February 17, 2019

    “The World is its Own Magic” – Suzuki Roshi As we practice and our understanding deepens, we’re often surprised by paradox. We begin to discover what the Laṅkāvatāra Sutra pointed to: Things are not what they seem… Nor are they otherwise. We intuitively know that there is more to life/reality then the usual, the familiar…

    Read More

  • Stephen Fulder

    How To Thrive in Hard Times

    Recorded : October 27, 2024

    When external circumstances are difficult and challenging we tend to get swept away by them. But instead, they can be a wake-up call. We turn to the dharma to help us meet the challenges from an enduring sense of freedom, a more transcendent point of view and skilful, heartful ways to act.

    Read More

  •

    What is the Ultimate Truth?

    Recorded : June 5, 2022

    The world of mind-body, mindfulness, meditation and well-being maximises priority on conventional or relative truth. This requires wise attention and change relative to our experience. We are familiar with taking up views, remaining neutral with views or holding onto views. We might call these views relative or absolute. Can we discover (ultimate) truth not bound…

    Read More

  •

    Waking down

    Recorded : November 26, 2017

    Rather than waking up it seems that most of us need to wake down. How can our insights and the awakening process move from being primarily experiential to becoming functional, relational, and lived? In this session Leela explores spiritual practice as a fundamentally earthly practice. How do we awake a presence that does not contract…

    Read More