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

Freedom without Expectations

With Vince Cullen recorded on October 1, 2023.

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

One of the Buddha’s primary realisations was ‘Life is painful and then you die.’ If this is true, then how do we respond to the difficulties of life? This session will explore how we are conditioned to protect, promote and satisfy a ‘self’ which can never be satisfied because ‘we are the slaves of craving.’ There will be a guided meditation cultivating an appropriate attitude to the vicissitudes of life.

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

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • 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

  • Kaira Jewel Lingo

    Soften the hard places: opening our hearts to those we find difficult

    The teacher Neem Karoli Baba said, “Don’t throw anyone out of your heart.” What about people who have hurt us, or are currently hurting us or others? In this session we explore together practices that help us to transform our resentment, fear and anger toward these difficult people, and learn to open our hearts to…

    Read More

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of July 18, 2022

    This week’s topic is Perfectly Imperfect. “True perfection seems imperfect, yet is perfectly itself.” – Lao Tzu. Expecting life to be perfect is stressful: a beautiful goal like “getting it right” prevents us from developing when it morphs into “never getting anything wrong.” The non-harming noble-truths path of the Dharma may arouse perfectionism, but if carefully followed, can set us free from such entrapment.

    Read More

  • Uncovering your Natural Awareness

    There are many ways to practice mindfulness, from the focused and deliberate to the expansive and relaxed. In this session, Diana teaches about natural awareness, which is a wide open, spacious, effortless awareness of awareness. Learn simple shifts and “Glimpse Practices” to connect with our radiant awareness. (A version of this recording with Spanish subtitles…

    Read More

  • Bringing the world into the heart.

    What does it mean to bring the world into the heart? In these divided times, for those of us practicing peace, for those of us dedicated to liberation, we’ve been offered a grand opportunity to accept what we haven’t been willing to accept. To give what we haven’t been able to give. To love what…

    Read More

  • Dave Smith

    Liberation through the Heart (Citta Vimmuti)

    Most people associate Dharma practice with the concept of Wisdom. Here, the idea is that we need to “know” something that we don’t already know. For English thinking minds this can become very problematic and can turn our practice into a cognitive or intellectual endeavor. With the earliest teachings of the Dharma we see that…

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    The Jewel of Sangha: We all need Community, Support and Love

    Martin writes: “Sangha is about community, support and love; it is one of the 3 jewels (Buddha-Dharma-Sangha) of our practice. But in the individualistic cultures and atomised structures in which many of us live, sangha too often gets inadequate attention. This is especially true in the Vipassana / Insight meditation tradition, because while silent meditation…

    Read More

  • Wes Nisker

    How to be an Earthling

    During this session we will use mindfulness meditation to explore our nature as nature, helping us to become more at ease and accepting of our lives and our place in the scheme of things.

    Read More