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

Mindfulness and the Four Noble Truths

With Dave Smith recorded on July 16, 2023.

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

Across all Buddhist lineages and traditions, the four noble truths hold the utmost importance. They are the Dharma’s most fundamental teaching. In modern society, the focus of Buddhism often shifts to meditation, particularly mindfulness, as the practice continues to be integrated into contemporary culture.

  • How can we bring the teachings of the four noble truths into our practice and cultivation of mindfulness?
  • How can we bring these ideas into the everyday moments of our lives?

Together, we will discuss ways of integrating the time-tested and transformative aspects of these teachings.

This session is appropriate for anyone interested in the topic, regardless of previous meditative experience.

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

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Stephen Fulder

    Equanimity: Dancing with the Unexpected

    Equanimity is a key spiritual faculty which allows us to face the known and the unknown, the ecstasies and the despairs, with steadiness and lightness. Equanimity helps us engage with life from an unlimited and interconnected perspective. The Buddhist image is of an island in the stormy seas – remembering that all islands are connected…

    Read More

  • Wiebke Pausch

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Wiebke Pausch – Week of December 4, 2023

    This week’s topic is “Exploring the Art of Radical Rest”. Conditioned and surrounded by a restless culture, we are constantly driven towards self-optimisation and self-improvement. Our practice is often affected by the striving and the effort to become a perfect meditator. We will explore together how to rest in the midst of all that is unfinished and imperfect. When we allow ourselves to rest deeply, experience can unfold naturally and we come into contact with the very essence of being alive. 

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    Pathways to Happiness

    Being human includes feeling great and feeling pain; given the changing nature of experience what kind of happiness is possible for us? Can we cultivate freedom, happiness and contentment that are less reliant on things ‘going our way’? The attitudes of goodwill, care and friendliness are some of our greatest allies in practice, and also…

    Read More

  • Deborah Eden Tull - Senior Dharma Teacher

    You are Not Alone: Healing the Myth of Separation

    The dharma invites us to face ourselves fully. But through fear, we sometimes distract ourselves, over-fill ourselves, and hold onto external attachments, in order to avoid.…what? The illusion that we are separate and isolated manifests in ways conscious and unconscious, but over time practice reveals to us that it is simply the ego that fears…

    Read More

  • Vimalasara Mason-John

    When did you stop breathing?

    We could say that the Buddha was teaching us to breath again. It’s said that the prince Siddhartha was sitting under a Bodhi tree, practicing the anapanasati (the mindfulness of breathing) when he gained enlightenment and became awake, a Buddha. He was aware of the whole experience of breathing. Through breathing he trained the mind…

    Read More

  • Miles Kessler

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Miles Kessler – Week of 19 January, 2026

    This week’s theme is: The Seven Stages of Purification in Insight Meditation

    The Seven Stages of Purification in Insight Meditation is a 5-day exploration of how insight naturally unfolds through practice, as described in the classical Theravāda map of purification. Each day will combine a short teaching with guided meditation, helping practitioners-whether new or experienced-recognize how challenge, insight, clarity, and release arise as part of a single, coherent developmental process. Rather than presenting the stages as goals to attain, this series offers them as an orienting framework: a way to understand what is already happening in your practice, normalize both ease and challenge, and cultivate confidence, patience, and continuity on the path of awakening.

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

    Read More

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of 03 March, 2025

    We’re delighted to have Nathan Glyde guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May they support and enrich your practice.

    This week’s theme is: It’s Like This, Right Now

    Acceptance must be applied wisely to lead to liberating awakening. We accept “it’s like this, right now”, but we don’t stop there. We also acknowledge that “this” is subject to changeable conditions, and we accept the opportunity to contribute to freedom.

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

    Read More

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of June 14, 2021

    This week’s theme is: Contentment Blockers

    The Buddha named five key ways access to contentment is blocked, and gave clear and profound teachings that break through to the peace, joy, and freedom they obscure.

    Our hearts and minds can be pulled into a mission of greed, or sucked into aversion and rejection. We often swing between restlessness and sluggishness. It is normal to doubt the possibility of developing our experience in more free and delightful ways.

    This week we will explore the possibilities available to us to calm habitual patterns and invite vibrant-tranquility.

    Read More