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

  • The Wisdom of Equanimity

    Recorded : June 4, 2023

    The dominant culture treats unpleasant feelings as problems, and pleasant feelings as if we should experience them all the time. This is neither possible nor wise. How can we fully feel the beautiful and painful aspects of our lives so that we are strengthened and enriched by the depth and breadth of this human experience?…

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Zohar Lavie – Week of May 30, 2022

    This week’s theme is: Bringing the Practice to Life. The Buddha’s teachings emphasise the whole of our lives as a rich ground for exploration and growth.  Through meditation, we cultivate skills and ways of relating that can be applied beyond formal meditation. This week we will explore bringing the practice to different areas and aspects of our lives. We will open to taste how this enlivens and rejuvenates our practice, and how it can nurture wellbeing for others and ourselves.

    Read More

  • Deborah Eden Tull - Senior Dharma Teacher

    Mindful Inquiry: A Path of Freedom and Joyful Responsibility

    Recorded : January 20, 2019

    Mindful Inquiry is the path of asking the question that points to freedom. This practice can support even long-time practitioners to find more relief from suffering and clarity about the ever-present wholeness of True Nature. A good teacher can point the way, but it is up to each of us to take responsibility for our…

    Read More

  • Martine Batchelor

    Mindfulness of feeling tone (vedana).

    Recorded : April 12, 2015

    During this session Martine practices and explores mindfulness of the feeling tones, which is the second foundation of the practice of mindfulness. First, she guides a meditation on mindfulness of the feeling tones. Afterwards she tries to define feeling tones and how to be mindful of them in our daily life. The Pali term Vedana…

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Zohar Lavie – Week of September 5, 2022

    This week’s topic is “Awakening into Experience Here and Now”. “You shouldn’t chase after the past
    or place expectations on the future.
    What is past
    is left behind.
    The future
    is as yet unreached.
    Whatever quality is present
    you clearly see right there,
    right there.
    Not taken in,
    unshaken,
    that’s how you develop the heart.” (MN 131)

    The essence of the Buddha’s teachings lies in these words. Unshakability and freedom are at the heart of awakening, they are what we cultivate in our practice. This week we will practice turning to our experience in ways that wake us up, right here and now.

    Read More

  •

    Settled Form, Steady Heart: Qigong for Mindful Presence

    Recorded : October 26, 2025

    When our physical energy feels restless or flat, it becomes harder to meet our inner experience with care and attention. This is why embodied practices such as qigong and mindful breathing are valuable: they help settle our body, making it far easier for our heart to find a steadier, more skillful unfolding. Please join this…

    Read More

  • JD Doyle

    Practicing the Middle Way: Navigating Between Extremes

    Recorded : May 14, 2023

    The Buddha invites us to travel the Middle Path, between extremes. How do we navigate this path that leads to knowledge, understanding and liberation? We practice with mindfulness and kindness to meet our day to day experiences and our conditioning: societal, familial, cultural, and historical. Inviting in curiosity and diligence, we learn to practice to…

    Read More