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

Search Sangha Live

Nourishing Compassion

With Roshi Joan Halifax recorded on January 9, 2022.

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

His Holiness the Dalai Lama has shared that compassion is not a luxury but a necessity for human beings to survive. There is no more important time to understand and strengthen compassion than right now.

During this session we’ll explore the geography of compassion, and how to cultivate compassion through rich practices from various Buddhist traditions. We will also explore the edge states of altruism, empathy, integrity, respect, and engagement, and how compassion can transform the shadow of these states into their healthy forms. Finally, we will look through the lens of Bernie Glassman’s Three Tenets of Not Knowing, Bearing Witness, and Compassionate Action as a way to meet the world with courage, care, and wisdom.

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

Tags: compassion wisdom

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • An Experience is Not The Point

    Recorded : May 13, 2018

    A deep application of attention includes the sustained application to any important experience. This includes a vast range of happy or painful, spiritual or conventional experiences. There is the view of the experience and the experience. What is a fresh way to see an important experience? Does the view of the experience matter more than…

    Read More

  •

    Certainty in an uncertain world.

    Recorded : October 1, 2017

    Consider that your presence on the cushion doesn’t guarantee balance. It’s what you bring to the cushion that matters. The same could be true of the fullness of our lives. It’s what we bring to it. What shifts when we focus on creating a life of certainty? A life of certainty that whether you are…

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

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

    Recorded : January 29, 2017

    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

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of March 21, 2022

    This week’s topic is: Harmonising Our Life. The Buddha’s wisdom highlights how we often live entangled in stress and distress. The earliest mentions of this disharmonious state called it being in an argument with life. Dharma teachings invite us away from habitual rigidity and reactivity into a responsive and harmonising release. This week we will uncover deeper and more creative ways of attuning to life that support inner and outer freedom and well-being.

    Read More

  • Ven. Pannavati Bikkhuni

    Developing insight into power.

    Recorded : February 21, 2016

    The Buddha talked about eight qualities of one who has transformed insight into a power. We examine these eight and apply introspection to assess where we are on the path to awakening and what is needed for completion.

    Read More

  • Christine Kupfer

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Christine Kupfer – Week of 15 September, 2025

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

    This week’s theme is: Equanimity – A Still Heart Amid the Waves

    A living balance of the heart welcomes both joy and storm. This week, from the ground of presence we open to the full tapestry of experience. Through meditation, reflection, and silence, we return to the quiet heart, where openness and steadiness meet, tasting freedom that is deeper than reactivity.

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

    Read More

  • Mark Coleman Profile Photo

    Nature Awareness Practice in the Anthropocene

    Recorded : February 6, 2022

    For many people, the natural world is a perennial place of refuge, resource and replenishment. It can be a profound support for bringing awareness into the outdoors. Yet, nature is under increasingly under siege. During this session we’ll explore how we can still take refuge in the natural world as a support for our well-being,…

    Read More

  • Nirmala Werner

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nirmala Werner – Week of 22 September, 2025

    We’re grateful to have Nirmala Werner guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May they support and deepen your practice.

    This week’s theme is: The Still Heart: Cultivating Equanimity in an Unsteady World

    In a world marked by constant change, uncertainty, and emotional intensity, equanimity can seem like a distant ideal-or even a form of indifference. But in the Buddhist tradition, equanimity (upekkhā) is not cold or passive. It is the spacious, steady heart that knows how to stay open, grounded, and present with whatever life brings.

    In this week we will explore equanimity as a deep source of inner freedom-neither detached nor reactive, but wise, loving, and awake.

    Through daily reflection and embodied practice, we will ask:

    What is true equanimity, and what is it not?

    How can we meet change without losing our ground?

    How do we love and let go-at the same time?

    And how can we live with a still heart in a restless world?

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

    Read More