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

Finding Refuge Within Uncertainty

With Celeste Young recorded on April 6, 2025.

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

During these unprecedented times, it can be challenging to find a sense of refuge amidst the storms of uncertainty swirling around us. While the timeless teachings of the Buddhist Tradition don’t offer us lasting certainty, they do offer the possibility of finding a reliable refuge in what are known as the 3 jewels: The Buddha, or the possibility of living with wakefulness, the Dharma, the teachings of the Buddha, or the universal truths we can all learn to open to, and the sangha, the community of people who are also walking the path – our spiritual friends. When we focus our attention on finding refuge in these 3, we are able to steady our hearts to meet changing conditions, and we become deeply resourced beyond our limiting sense of a separate self. As we find refuge and rest in the three jewels, we discover we are never alone in our practice, and that we can continue to engage with life from a place of our deepest values.

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

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Can love reveal ultimate reality?

    We know the cost to the reality of life through deprivation of love.

    Science has eliminated love from its analysis of reality.

    We cannot know ultimate reality though highlighting the mind and dismissing the heart or vice-versa.

    The Buddha made frequent reference to metta with its three-fold application of deep love, kindness or friendship.

    This talk will explore the relationship of love to ultimate reality.

    Read More

  • Ralph Steele

    Noble Right View

    In this session you will gain insight into understanding what makes the Buddhist practice unique. You’ll receive guidance in relation to knowing when you are not on the path of awakening, and gain a deeper appreciation of the skills presented by the Buddha.

    Read More

  • Christine Kupfer

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Christine Kupfer – Week of February 26, 2024

    This week’s topic is “Fear and Fearlessness in the Midst of Uncertainty”. We try to secure our lives by any means necessary. We do our best, we tend to our business, and boom!, a crisis occurs. Whether it’s an ecological, political, pandemic, professional, relational or spiritual crisis…  life does not leave us settled, bringing up a whole procession of fears and worries. So how can we find peace? How can we become fearless? This is the theme we will explore this week on Sangha Live.

    Read More

  • Christine Kupfer

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Christine Kupfer – Week of 30 June, 2025

    We’re grateful to have Christine Kupfer guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May they support and enrich your practice.

    This week’s theme is: Meditating on the Five Elements : A Journey into Interconnectedness

    This week, we explore how the classical elements – earth, water, fire, air and space – invite a meeting between our inner landscape and the living world. Each session offers a meditative gesture of presence, revealing that we are never separate: we are the breath, the body, and earth becoming aware of itself.

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

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    Visions of a free life

    Freedom is a central concern of all our lives, yet has many different manifestations, some of which run completely contrary to others. This class will explores the importance of social freedoms, inner freedom, personal and collective freedoms. We explore how different perspectives on free-ness shape how we practice; and how we understand life and our…

    Read More

  • The freeing of human consciousness: from seeing the world ‘out there’, separate and alien, to directly knowing, feeling, and living the intimacy of all things

    The Shurangama Sutra, which points out the foundations of Zen practice, discusses the essential nature of mind as the “primal essence of consciousness that brings forth all conditions.” Implied is the heart-mind (citta) both profoundly intimate with all things while at the same time free and independent of all things. How is it to live…

    Read More

  • Deborah Eden Tull - Senior Dharma Teacher

    Mindful Inquiry: A Path of Freedom and Joyful Responsibility

    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