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

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

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Ayala Gill – Week of March 18, 2024

    This week’s topic is “Love’s Flavours and Flow”. Love never leaves us. It’s already here in each thought, sight, taste, smell, sound, sensation and movement. Love is already here, resting beside each pain, celebrating each delight and expanding into the great unknown with infinite patience and warmth. Love effortlessly flows into giving and receiving, and mysteriously radiates in wordless Being. Love’s presence is known in the moment we choose to recognise, allow and participate in the dance of its ongoing flavours and flow.

    Read More

  • Sitting with Pointlessness – Living with Potentiality

    During a recent retreat, the teachers’ instruction was to hold the question ‘What is this?’ in mind. While sitting on the cushion, the thought struck me that my life is futile! I am genetically programmed for survival and sex; everything else is just distracting window-dressing. This talk will explore the journey from the apparent ‘futility’…

    Read More

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of September 19, 2022

    This week’s topic is “Compose Yourself”. Dharma teachings appear to pull ‘us’ in two directions: on the one hand we pacify, renouncing and let go of everything, even of ourselves; on the other we energise, expanding our being into interconnection, to extend a limitless, inclusive welcome to all everywhere. But in actuality, we discover that there is no contradiction with this mismatch. For the well-composed practitioner, expanding goodwill and liberating release harmoniously and melodically intertwine.

    Read More

  • Justine Dawson

    The Appropriate Response

    When a monk asked the 10th Century Zen master Yunmen, “What are the teachings of a whole lifetime?” Yunmen replied, “An appropriate response.”  What is this appropriate response and how do we know we’ve got it right? Beyond linear formulas, Dharma teachings point to a natural intelligence that guides us in a spontaneous responsiveness to life….

    Read More

  • Deborah Eden Tull - Senior Dharma Teacher

    The Dharma of Displacement: Finding Sacred Ground Amidst Groundlessness

    We live in a time when so many beings – human and more-than-human – are being physically displaced – by climate events, wars, aggressive deportations, and more. This mirrors an internal collective experience of disorientation and displacement. To find ground in the midst of accelerated change is our practice. In this Sunday insight gathering we…

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Zohar Lavie – Week of February 7, 2022

    This week’s theme is: Finding Happiness and Wellbeing on the Path

    The understanding of how dukkha is conditioned and constructed lies at the heart of Dharma teachings. Dukkha and wellbeing are in relationship with each other; the abandonment of the causes of dukkha leads to wellbeing. The nourishment of the causes for wellbeing decreases dukkha. During this week we will explore our capacity to uncover and develop wellbeing through our practice, in ways that enrich our lives.

    Read More