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

Practicing for the love of it.

With Martin Aylward recorded on January 17, 2016.

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

Before the session Martin wrote: “A Burmese teacher once told a friend of mine to always enjoy his practice. We love meditation in theory, and we want to grow and transform, and we certainly would like to be liberated from our suffering. And yet! We easily turn meditation into a chore, and feel discouraged by our spiritual ‘progress’ or lack of it.”

This class explores holding our practice lightly, while really committing our heart to it, with time for meditation, reflections from the teacher, and interactive video discussion with participants.

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

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Nathan Glyde

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

    This week’s topic is: Deeply Rooted, Fully Alive. This week we will explore the profound, yet accessible teachings of equipoise and equanimity. One of the best images for this sensitive balancing relationship with all things is a deeply rooted and flexible tree in a windy storm. The tree, equipoised, does not resist the wind, bending and yielding to its force. Yet, well nourished from the root, it returns to noble uprightness as soon as the pressure passes.

    Read More

  • Ronya Banks

    Embodied Wisdom: the Fruit of Buddhist Practice

    Cultivating embodied wisdom can provide us with lasting equanimity in the face of life’s inevitable ups and downs. During this session, Ronya offers Buddhist practices and frameworks to help us access deep peace and profound contentment for life’s precious journey.

    Read More

  • Norman Blair

    Settling Into Your Body In Meditation – December 2023

    Finding a comfortable body posture when meditating is a crucial element in our practice. We can use our bodies as a way of experiencing change and impermanence. Each time is different. In this session we will be looking at ways to make our bodies comfortable for meditation – both standing (if appropriate for your body)…

    Read More

  • The Spectrum of Awareness Practices

      This session will explore different ways in which attention works and associated meditation practices: from focused awareness, to flexible awareness, to natural awareness. We’ll do a number of fun experiential practices in hopes of understanding a variety of ways to meditate and how we can refine our own practice. Diana draws from her latest…

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    Transforming the poisons.

    Buddha points out the three main ways we get pulled into activity and self-contraction – Greed, Hatred and Delusion – which Martin often translates as Desire, Defense and Distraction. This class explores creative ways of meeting these forces in everyday life, and explores powerful reflections for each of the three.

    Read More

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Ayala Gill – Week of 02 June, 2025

    We’re delighted to have Ayala Gill guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May these sessions support and deepen your practice.

    This week’s theme is: The Body is a Doorway to Love

    Through relating to the elements of the body, we cultivate a presence that is grounded, awake, open, relaxed and spacious.
    As the body becomes a more stable home for the heart and mind, everything settles and softens back to its natural state of aliveness and love.

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

    Read More

  • David Cabrera

    A Return To Naturalness

    From pure emptiness the wondrous appears… In the session we will explore different somatic approaches to cultivate a sense of calm and ease. An invitation into insight meditation and letting go into a natural state of flow.

    Read More