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

How to Recharge Your Practice with a Tried and True Inquiry

With Lisa Ernst recorded on October 22, 2023.

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

Even if you’ve been meditating for years, you probably encounter old patterns that seem impervious to your mindful awareness. Maybe at times these patterns are dormant, but during challenging moments they reappear and perhaps feel intractable. In this session we’ll explore inquiry practices that can help interrupt and disentangle the mind from its habitual “stuck” places and open our hearts to the ground of insight.

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

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Sophie Boyer

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Sophie Boyer – Week of Mar 11, 2024

    This week’s topic is “To Be on the Road Without Leaving Home”. Zen Master Hakuin reveals an apparent tension between movement and stillness in this statement. What may the road refer to? What is called home? Sophie Boyer will lead our Daily Meditations this week, inviting us to engage with this paradoxical dynamic. We’ll discover that stability and ground can become more spacious in every situation, every experience, and every condition. How it is possible to discover, or re-discover, home … endlessly.

    Read More

  • James Baraz

    Groundlessness: Letting Go Into the Unknown

    Pema Chödrön writes, “It’s not impermanence per se, or knowing we’re going to die, that is the cause of our suffering. Rather, it’s our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation.” The truth of impermanence means that ultimately there is nothing we can rely on for lasting happiness. We will investigate the underlying feeling…

    Read More

  • Patience: In Praise of an Undervalued Helper

    Patience can be one of those qualities which we think of as being theoretically helpful but feel little motivation to actually cultivate and strengthen. So much emphasis in our busy world of achieving goals and getting tasks done is about doing, taking action and fixing problems. We will spend this session exploring the benefits of…

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    The nature of experience. Part 3: Non Self Existence.

    Today’s session is the third in a special run of three consecutive sessions with Martin, where he looks deeply at the nature of experience through Buddha’s profound descriptions of reality – Impermanence, Emptiness, Non self-existence. The classes point directly to how these themes can come alive in our practice and understanding, looking at the personal,…

    Read More

  • Sitting with Pointlessness – Living with Potentiality

    During a recent retreat, the teachers’ instruction was to hold the question ‘What is this?’ in mind. While sitting on the cushion, the thought struck me that my life is futile! I am genetically programmed for survival and sex; everything else is just distracting window-dressing. This talk will explore the journey from the apparent ‘futility’…

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    Wise Acceptance

    What is the importance of acceptance and allowing in developing a wise relationship to our practice and our lives? We often try to find a one size fits all approach but like all dynamic things in life we need to be selective about when we use these approaches and understand when they are effective. This…

    Read More

  • Jill Satterfield

    Imagination: An Integral Aspect of Liberating the Heart

    Our heart/mind is naturally creative; it foresees, remembers, dreams, and perceives. The products of our imagination shape our intentions, expanding the realm of possibilities beyond what we’ve learned, seen, or experienced thus far. We can give ourselves permission to imagine and co-create our lives. And once this is cultivated and the doors of perception are…

    Read More