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

Love’s in Need of Love: The Practice of Love as Social Resistance

With Lama Rod Owens recorded on July 1, 2017.

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

The great Black American singer and songwriter Stevie Wonder once sang, “Love’s in need of love today.” His words couldn’t be more true as we face a global community struggling with war, poverty, illness, climate instability, and the rise of political authorities and governments who do not seem to be grounded in compassion or kindness. We speak about love and attempt to practice love but some of us are losing faith in the transformative power of the wish for ourselves and others to be happy. Our practice of love is in need of our renewed faith in love. In this talk, we explore the question of how practicing love can become a strategy that resists and undoes our experiences of fear, apathy, and numbness as we attempt to live and love in a challenging world.

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

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Scott Tusa

    Living From a Sense of Call and Response

    Deep listening goes beyond merely using our ears; it encompasses engaging our eyes, hearts, and bodies as well. As practitioners of meditation, we can also learn to listen with mindful awareness. In this session, we will explore how call and response, a musical concept, also applies to meditation and our daily interactions. Join us, and…

    Read More

  • Deborah Eden Tull - Senior Dharma Teacher

    Receptivity: Deep Listening as an Antidote to Reactivity and Violence

    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…

    Read More

  • Yahel Avigur

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Yahel Avigur – Week of 14 July, 2025

    We’re delighted to have Yahel Avigur guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May these sessions enrich and support your practice.

    This week’s theme is: Metta — Healing All Aspects

    This week, we’ll open to the healing power of metta – loving-kindness, or goodwill – as a transformative force in our lives. We’ll practice offering this gentle warmth first to those we naturally care about, and to ourselves. Gradually, we’ll widen the circle, allowing metta to infuse our relationships with neutral people, those we find difficult, and ultimately all beings. As kindness suffuses more corners of our hearts and lives, we may begin to discover a growing sense of spaciousness and connection – and with it, insight, balance, and inner freedom.

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

    Read More

  • The Power of a New Year’s Resolution

    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…

    Read More

  • A Relational Dhamma

    If humans are intrinsically relational creatures, how do we integrate this understanding with the Buddha’s teachings on suffering and its cessation? Relational suffering and craving? Dependent origination? In this session, we explore the power and necessity of a relational understanding of the Buddha’s teachings. We discuss and practice relational aspects of the path, including the…

    Read More

  • Ralph Steele

    The noble jewel of Right Effort

    Right Effort is a jewel within a jewel. We investigate the Four Right Exertions that fuel Right Effort and the Hindrances that attempt to derail our intention. You will gain insight into why the Buddha referenced Right Effort as one of his eight precious disciples, which is a daily chant in the monasteries.

    Read More

  • Lisa Ernst

    When the Path Becomes Natural

    Much of the time, the path of meditation and awareness must be worked with intention, realigning ourselves with the teachings, with practice, lovingkindness and compassion. Other times, the path may become an effortless, natural part of our lives. We will explore the ways our practice feels easeful and our intentions metabolized and also how we…

    Read More