To live by vow is a radical reorientation – from reactivity to response-ability, and from fear to love.
This session will examine what it means to walk the spiritual path, and consider the importance of inspiration, aspiration and aligned, appropriate action.
Together we will explore the tenderness and power of meeting the world from what the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki called “the heart’s inmost request”.
Please note that the recording of this session starts some way into the meditation.
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We start a new year. It is 2020. Perhaps the intensity of environmental dramas in 2019 finally made clear to many people the vulnerabilities to life on Earth. It might be useful to make a New Year’s resolution that lasts longer than a week. Here are four considerations. 1. Dedicate an hour a day or…
Daily meditations with Martin Aylward.
This week’s theme is: The Mystery of Being
We often live entangled in memories, stories, and fixed images of ourselves and the world. We’re running behind, trying to catch up. We’re reacting rather than responding to life. Surely there is more to this earthly journey?
The practice of sacred attention, of embodied awareness and presence, leads us to the mysterious ground of our nature.
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This week’s theme is: Identifying the Many Masks of the Inner Critic
Often we think of the inner critic as the constant nagging inner discourse which dismisses our good qualities, questions our lovability, and our potential for goodness. Being a master/mistress of disguise, the inner critic takes on many forms; it wraps our decision making process in veils of doubt, pushes us into compulsive activity, traps us in paralysis, and distorts our views on others.
Luckily, the Dharma path offers us tools to meet this painful heart-mind dynamic. This week we will practice summoning qualities like wisdom, kindness, equanimity, concentration, appreciation, compassion and inquiry, in order to meet our inner critic in a skilful way.
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How many choices will you make today? Which ones are likely to lead to happiness and which to suffering? Often we have many more options than we think we do. The Buddha’s teachings offer clear guidance on how to make choices that help us develop our habits, our character, and our karma in a way…
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As we prepare for Halloween and All Souls Day, we explore how we can practice the wisdom of interbeing to help us nurture the wholesome seeds our ancestors transmitted to us and transform the unwholesome habit energies we have received from them.
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In this session, we explore how our relationships are the very path of awakening and how we can show up fully in our interactions with others, especially those we find challenging. People we find difficult can teach us a great deal and we learn ways to practice with these painful relationships to profit from their…
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During this session we be explore life’s basic necessities and drives, and the critical difference between ‘getting along’ and ‘getting ahead.’ Our meditation practice will be based on the Wise-Heartedness Bhavana to help us cultivate skilful response to distractions in daily life. A transcript of this session is available here.