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.
Discover more from the Dharma Library
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Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nirmala Werner – Week of May 27 – 31, 2024
This week’s topic is “Mindfulness of the nervous system: transforming fear, struggle and separation into love and connection”. We humans are social animals and need each other to feel safe and secure, to grow and to nourish ourselves. How can we live with a sense of connection, loving-kindness, and inner family? Our meditation practice allows us to take a break between stimulus and response. When we come into contact with our loved ones, we all too easily lose the inner freedom we think we have achieved and avoid our difficulties, also called spiritual bypassing. This week we explore what supports us to react flexibly to the internal and external world, to relax and to allow closeness and real intimacy. We will look into the first foundation of mindfulness, mindfulness of the body, including harmonizing the body formations and nervous system to meet our difficulties with gentleness.
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Practicing the Middle Way: Navigating Between Extremes
Recorded :
May 14, 2023 The Buddha invites us to travel the Middle Path, between extremes. How do we navigate this path that leads to knowledge, understanding and liberation? We practice with mindfulness and kindness to meet our day to day experiences and our conditioning: societal, familial, cultural, and historical. Inviting in curiosity and diligence, we learn to practice to…
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Five tenets of a whole life path
Recorded :
November 19, 2017 Many long for a way to “integrate” their Buddhist practice with what is often called “the rest of my life.” This often fails. Doesn’t integration refer to separate things that must be brought together? In this talk, Gregory offers what he calls the Five Tenets of a Whole Life Path, a practical, yet demanding, way…
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Receptivity: Deep Listening as an Antidote to Reactivity and Violence
Recorded :
October 14, 2018 In these hyped up divisive times, there is an ever-greater need for tools to de-condition ourselves from reactivity. The practice of listening – within ourselves and with others – is much more significant than we often acknowledge. The contrast of receptivity against the backdrop of a world conditioned to impose, label, judge, and solve, is…
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Daily Meditation Recordings, with Martin Aylward – Week of 19 May, 2025
We’re honored to have Martin Aylward offering our Daily Meditation sessions this week. We hope they are nourishing for your practice. This week’s theme is: Slow Down, Open Up: Ways Into Being Where You Already Are
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The Spectrum of Sensuality – Where do I stand?
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October 13, 2024 The extremes of addiction to sense pleasure and addiction to self-mortification are not the path to happiness. The spectrum of human sensuality spans from pleasure to pain, pleasant to unpleasant, from hedonic excesses to self-harm, encompassing a vast range that is likely different for everyone. What is considered the Middle Way for a monastic might…
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Compassion is a Political Act
Recorded :
September 20, 2020 This session is invitation for white practitioners and others to join Vimalasara in a discussion on the theme of liberation, the central tenet of Buddhist teachings. No one is liberated until we are all liberated. What if we made explicit that Black Lives Matter was part of the Bodhisattva vow? How would that impact our…
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Dancing with Dukkha and Sukha: Meeting the 10,000 joys and sorrows of our daily lives
Recorded :
May 7, 2023 In this ever-changing landscape of living, the buddha dharma and psychological inquiry offer us skillful ways to pause and soften into the things that bring pain and suffering, while also reminding us to fully embrace the many contentments and connections life also beautifully and innocently offers. In our time together, Sarah will invite us to…
