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

Exploring Karma, Choice and the Mind

With Lisa Ernst recorded on June 30, 2024.

Found our teachings useful? Help us continue our work and support your teachers with a donation. Here’s how.

Karma is action in Buddhism, driven by intention. With practice we cultivate the ability to choose our response and our actions, internally and externally. We might think if our intentions are good our actions will follow, but our intentions are often under the influence of strong conditioning that prevents us from living our choices. But with committed practice, we can cultivate greater freedom to live from our truest intentions.

Listen to the audio version below, or click here to download the mp3.

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Love & Boundaries

    Our practice cultivates qualities of boundless love, whether through loving kindness practice, or opening to the love inherent in deep states of awareness. But can we really love everyone boundlessly? What about political leaders who may be causing tremendous suffering? Or when our boundaries get crossed in any way—personally, at work, in our families, or…

    Read More

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Ulla Koenig – Week of June 17, 2024

    This week’s theme is “Preparing the Heart and Mind”. In Buddhist practice we often hear we should let go. And often enough we would really like to let go of those thoughts, impulses, moods and contractions which keep us agitated and in unease. But letting go is rarely something we decide to do; and neither is holding on. In the upcoming week we will explore why the heart-mind holds on to something and how we can prepare, nourish and soothe it, so that letting go becomes a natural process, not a willful command.

    Read More

  • Miles Kessler

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Miles Kessler – Week of 20 October, 2025

    This week, we’re delighted to have Miles Kessler guiding our Daily Meditation sessions. May they enrich your practice.

    This week’s theme is: Meditation And The Dark Night Of The Soul

    The “Dark Night Of The Soul” is nothing less than an ego death, and rebirth process that everyone goes through from time to time in life. As it happens, the “Dark Night Of The Soul” is also beautifully “coded” into insight meditation practices through a series of advanced stages know as the “Dukkha Nanas”. The “Dark Night” stages are awaiting everyone who is walking the path of meditative insight.
    In this week of Daily Meditations with Sangha Live, you are invited to join in a teaching of “Meditation And The Dark Night Of The Soul.” Throughout this week, you will explore how the “Dark Night Of The Soul” process unfolds in the stages of insight meditation. And more importantly, how the insights of these stages inform us in our lives.

    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 Jan 16, 2023

    This week’s theme is “Change, Loss and Dying: Meeting the Common Denominator”. When we come in touch with the fragility of our existence, it is only natural that fear or sadness might well up. The constant inward and outward change contrasts with our lack of control. To experience change, loss and death, is a substantial challenge for all of us. The Buddha did not shy away from these common human denominators, but offered perspectives and practices which allow us to meet them with compassion, while enabling the heart to rest in love and peacefulness.

    Read More

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of 03 March, 2025

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

    This week’s theme is: It’s Like This, Right Now

    Acceptance must be applied wisely to lead to liberating awakening. We accept “it’s like this, right now”, but we don’t stop there. We also acknowledge that “this” is subject to changeable conditions, and we accept the opportunity to contribute to freedom.

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

    Read More

  • Embodying Presence – the Deep Current

    A river of presence flows through all of life, connecting us with ourselves and each other and the essence of living. In this session, let’s open to a direct experience of this clear, wakeful presence. The practice of embodied, mindful meditation opens the possibility to understand and transform our habits of dissatisfaction and distraction and…

    Read More