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

  • Nothing is reliable outside liberation.

    Practice places emphasis on seeing impermanence. Such a practice easily becomes habitual to the degree we miss the point. There is nothing reliable owing to impermanence. There is nothing we can depend upon in this world of mentality and materiality, inner and outer. If we abide deeply clear about this, the stress and fears fade…

    Read More

  • Pamela Weiss

    Awakening a Fierce Feminine Buddhism

    What would it look like to re-weave historical and archetypal women’s stories back into the fabric of Buddhist teachings? How could the inclusion of feminine qualities—receptivity, relationship, intuition and embodiment—transform the shape of practice? Join Pamela Weiss for an exploration on how to reimagine Buddhism through a feminine lens.

    Read More

  • Nicola Redfern

    Relational Dharma

    What does the Dharma have to say about how we relate: to ourselves, to each other and to the environment? How might we touch in to the energizing potential of waking up together? This session will draw from the inherently relational practices of both the Zen koan tradition and Insight Dialogue to consider ways that…

    Read More

  • Kaira Jewel Lingo

    Other People Are the Path: Relationships as Practice

    In this session, we explore how our relationships are the very path of awakening and how we can show up fully in our interactions with others, especially those we find challenging. People we find difficult can teach us a great deal and we learn ways to practice with these painful relationships to profit from their…

    Read More

  • Stephen Fulder

    What Exists Beyond Our Boundaries?

    Spiritual practice is often a journey to discover spaciousness, openness and absorption into everything else. From form to formless. From more spaciousness in the mind to subtle and beautiful limitless states that are clearly described in the Buddhist tradition such as the four formless jhanas or realms. We will explore and practice these states and…

    Read More

  • Stephen Fulder

    Equanimity: Dancing with the Unexpected

    Equanimity is a key spiritual faculty which allows us to face the known and the unknown, the ecstasies and the despairs, with steadiness and lightness. Equanimity helps us engage with life from an unlimited and interconnected perspective. The Buddhist image is of an island in the stormy seas – remembering that all islands are connected…

    Read More