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

  • Jill Satterfield

    The Procurement of Kindness and Sanity

    Jill writes: “We all possess the capacity to be very aware of our internal landscapes of body, heart and mind. And fortunately, with practice, we can tend to what we see, feel and know as it all arises in the moment, rather than days, months or decades later. It sure saves a lot of pain…

    Read More

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Ulla Koenig – Week of July 10, 2023

    This week’s theme is “The Compassionate Heart”. Karuna, usually translated as compassion, is our hearts’ ability to relate with care towards ourselves, others and experience in general. Living in a complex world with imperfect others and self, an attitude and practice of compassion can be an immense support. But when misunderstood, it can equally turn into pity, generate overwhelm, make us lose balance and create friction with the concept of responsibility. We will therefore dedicate this upcoming week to an indepth exploration into the concept of compassion.

    Read More

  • Climate Code Red

    However challenging, we are in these times because we need to be here. We are here to release from what no longer serves and to infuse a new story with clear, wise, conscious intention; a story about building our collective resilience as we rise, with compassion, to save what we can.

    Read More

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of March 8, 2021

    This week’s topic is The Freedom of an Unassuming Mind.

    The Buddha used the image of a tangled and knotted thread to represent the complex roots of human suffering and distress. It takes sensitivity, persistence, and care to disentangle the tangle of ‘dukkha’. A tricky part of this is that our assumptions about the world radically shape the way the world appears, while remaining quite hidden to us. Fortunately, wisdom teachings and practices bring assumptions into view and support the untying of these unseen knots, opening us into a wide and free existence.

    Read More

  • The First Teaching: Radical Medicine for a Painful World

    The July full moon marks Dhamma Day (Āsāḷha Pūjā), the anniversary of the Buddha’s very first teaching, given to five friends in a deer park 2,614 years ago. This one ancient talk is said to contain the entire path. And it still asks something…

    Read More