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

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    Practice and Prejudice: Waking up to our reality blinkers

    Martin writes: “Do you remember that Youtube video ‘Awareness test’ from a few years ago, where you’re asked to pay attention to one thing (passes made by the team in white) and you end up completely missing something else? (check it out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4 – it only takes 30 seconds) We perceive reality in accordance with…

    Read More

  • The ultimate relationship: opening to love.

    We are deeply conditioned to look for love outside ourselves. In that desperate search, we not only experience the frustration and the futility of grasping, but we lose sight of who we authentically are. Join us as we engage in practices that not only remind us of our true nature, but guide us to a…

    Read More

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings with Nathan Glyde – Week of January 29, 2024

    This week’s topic is “Getting A Feel For Feeling”. As we perceive, we add a feeling (vedanā) to our experience. When we are unaware of this process and react to the projected feeling, it causes unnecessary suffering (dukkha). However, understanding this process and responding skilfully leads to one of the deepest senses of freedom available. Let’s explore this freedom through our daily meditations this week.

    Read More

  • Jill Satterfield

    Imagination: An Integral Aspect of Liberating the Heart

    Our heart/mind is naturally creative; it foresees, remembers, dreams, and perceives. The products of our imagination shape our intentions, expanding the realm of possibilities beyond what we’ve learned, seen, or experienced thus far. We can give ourselves permission to imagine and co-create our lives. And once this is cultivated and the doors of perception are…

    Read More

  • Why Meditate?

    Many people have encountered the Buddha’s teachings when learning to meditate. Many more people in the world, however, have learned about the Buddha through stories imparting lessons about how to live wisely. Why is there so much emphasis on meditation? What else is there in the teachings to support wise and ethical living?

    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