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

How Does Meditation Support the Path of Awakening?

With Shaila Catherine recorded on December 15, 2019.

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

Scientists have documented some significant and measurable changes that occur as a result of meditation. But Buddhist practice is not limited to calm, pleasant, relaxing states of meditation. The liberating path includes a broad range of practices that produce a wide variety of benefits. We learn how we encounter the world of the senses; we unravel distortions of perception. We weaken defilements. We learn to let go. In this talk, Shaila Catherine points to the liberating potential of the path.

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

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Jessica Morey

    The seven factors of awakening.

    Jessica discusses the seven factors of awakening (mindfulness, tranquility/relaxation, piti/joy, concentration, investigation, viriya/courageous energy, equanimity) and how to work with them in meditation practice to balance the mind and support insight through specific meditative techniques.

    Read More

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of 27 January, 2025

    We’re grateful to have Nathan Glyde guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May these sessions support and deepen your practice.

    This week’s theme is: Time For Life

    Dharma teachings invite a profound reduction in stress. When stress is present, there is a sense of time pressure, urgency, and haste. Conversely, when there is freedom and ease, our perception of time expands in countless ways. Dharma practice can be viewed as methods to significantly alter our sense of time, welcoming us into a well-paced connection that makes time for life.

    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 26 January, 2026

    This week’s theme is: The Tender Edge of Awareness: Befriending the Unwanted Within

    We all encounter emotions we’d rather not admit to ourselves and others. Self-righteousness, rage, ill will, revenge, vanity or greed are just a few of the dynamics the Buddha encouraged us to have a good eye on. In the upcoming week, we will practice how to meet such dynamics with the necessary clarity rather than self-judgement or denial.

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

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Zohar Lavie – Week of 09 June, 2025

    We’re delighted to have Zohar Lavie guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May these sessions support and deepen your practice.

    This week’s theme is: Steadiness, Clarity and Care in Challenging Times

    During this week of practice, we will explore and practice the boundless qualities of compassion and equanimity. Compassion as the heart’s capacity to open and attend to suffering, and equanimity as the heart’s ability to face life in all its aspects with clarity and steadiness.
    These two beautiful qualities complement and nourish each other. They support us to meet experience and act within it in beneficial ways, even in difficult times.

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

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Martin Aylward – Week of 8 July, 2024

    This week’s topic is “Love and Letting Go: Meeting Life Spaciously and Graciously”. Join us for a series of Daily Meditations where we’ll discover how to meet life with openness and grace. Together, we will explore the profound dance between love and letting go, and cultivate a spacious presence that embraces our experiences with tenderness and wisdom.

    Read More

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of Jan 3, 2022

    This week’s topic is: Beginning to See More Possibilities.

    The Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki, said: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” With a beginner’s possibilities we can release our heart’s wholesome aspirations. Let’s engender a beginners spirit, and manifest our innate potential for freedom and well-being: embodying a saint’s patience to start again; an adventurer’s openness to step out of constricted views; and a creative’s zeal to reimagine ourselves and our world”

    Read More

  • Befriending the emotions.

    So often we struggle because we’re resisting, fixing, changing, or even “transcending” our experiences. What shifts when instead of pushing our emotions away, we invite them closer in? What changes when we learn to relate to our emotions like a welcoming friend? And, what changes when we are able to access the place in which…

    Read More