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

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    Light on the path: pleasure, joy, fulfilment and free-ness.

    Recorded : September 24, 2017

    Our founding and guiding teacher Martin Aylward reflects on the importance of being nourished and uplifted by our practice. He looks at the nature of happiness and our sometimes difficult relationship with pleasure; explore opening up to joy, and point to ways in which dharma practice is fulfilling and freeing.

    Read More

  •

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Milla Gregor – Week of 13 January, 2025

    We’re delighted to have Milla Gregor guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May they support and enrich your practice.

    This week’s theme is: How to respond to an unjust burning world (without losing your mind)

    Our Dharma Library thrives through collective generosity. Your donation helps sustain this offering for our entire community.

    Read More

  •

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Ulla Koenig – Week of July 11, 2022

    This week’s topic is Mindfulness in Daily Life. Trying to practice mindfulness in the busyness of our daily lives can leave us confused or frustrated. We know the potential benefits of such a practice, but the different pace, sensory input and constant activity make it challenging to remember to practice, let alone develop a continuous sense of presence. In this week, we explore hands-on sustainable practices with fresh perspectives, free from idealistic expectations or guilt.

    Read More

  •

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Catherine McGee – Week of March 6, 2023

    This week’s theme is “Exploring and Developing the Power of a Light Touch”. A light touch can allow our practice to unfold more easefully, make the depths of our hearts more available and create a greater agility in our relationships with the world. With our body as the primary ground for our practice we will explore different ways to cultivate this kind of attention, enjoy the fruits of our efforts and attend to what might hinder this natural capacity

    Read More

  •

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Milla Gregor – Week of 11 November, 2024

    This week’s theme is: Warm Solitude, Beautiful Nature

    There are many ways to be solitary, whether alone or in company. How might we cultivate a warm, friendly solitude? Nature is beautiful, both ‘out there’ and ‘in here’. How might we appreciate and support nature’s beauty? This week we’ll explore these questions together through practice, reflection and experiment.

    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

  • Nina la Rosa

    Freedom through focusing in.

    Recorded : September 25, 2016

    Before this live session, Nina wrote: “I want to share a mindfulness technique this Sunday that’s particularly alive in my life right now. As a new mother I’ve experienced an increase in planning, anticipating, worrying, and fear. Before the birth of my daughter a few months ago I read a book by Karen Maezen Miller,…

    Read More