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

  • Wide Dharma, wide path.

    Recorded : November 13, 2016

    Many of us long to experience the Buddhist path in all of our lives, but really only feel its aliveness when we meditate. There’s an incompleteness, a gap, when it comes to our everyday activities and our relationships, where we catch only a whiff of the truths of suffering and the Path. But when we…

    Read More

  •

    Whole body breathing to regulate your mind and body

    Recorded : April 2, 2023

    In this session Vidyamala introduces key areas of body awareness where mindful breathing can help to bring about regulation and calm in the body/heart/mind. She calls these the 5 B’s of the breath: Buttocks, Belly, Back, Back of the throat and Brain. She introduces the physiology of these areas and then leads a guided meditation….

    Read More

  • Shaila Catherine

    Protecting the Mind

    Recorded : April 20, 2025

    The encounter with sensory experiences can lead to insight and calm, or reactivity and suffering. How do you guard your mind in the midst of a daily barrage of sensory input? How do you protect your mind so that tranquility and wisdom will be well established? The Buddha encouraged restraint of the senses, but this…

    Read More

  • Stephen Fulder

    Equanimity: Dancing with the Unexpected

    Recorded : July 8, 2018

    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

  • Ralph Steele

    The Elephant’s Footprint

    Recorded : March 21, 2021

    Looking at The Four Noble Truths as the way to give us guidance in our world and how to work with racial separation in our Global Dharma sanghas. Is having teachers of Color and Dharma community racial sensitivity training the right way or wrong way and is that enough?

    Read More

  • Lama Rod Owens

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

    Recorded : July 1, 2017

    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….

    Read More