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 restraint does not require avoidance of sensory contacts or control of the external environment. In this talk, Shaila Catherine will describe how mindfulness allows us to meet the experiences of sensory contact – of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking with a mind free of reactivity. Mindfulness protects the mind so that it does not come under the sway of defilements. Mindfulness is a special quality of attention that is balanced in the moment of observing experience. Before looking, before reaching, before speaking, before any activity, we can establish the intention of mindfully meeting the experience without giving rise to anger, irritation, lust, fear, or any defilement. The practice of sensory restraint leads to a life of happiness and joy, and lays the foundation for experiences of deep concentration and awakening.
Discover more from the Dharma Library
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Daily Meditation Recordings, with Martin Aylward – Week of 23 September, 2024
This week’s topic is “Fluidly, fully, freely”. This week will explore facets of our ever-changing experience, and how the river of life can remind us to meet everything more fluidly, and thus to live more freely.
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Daily Meditation Recordings, with Martin Aylward – Week of May 24, 2021
We’re fortunate that Martin Aylward has generously offered to lead our daily meditation sessions for Europe and the UK this week. To find out more about Martin, and view his other recordings on the platform, click here.
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Daily Meditation Recordings, with Zohar Lavie – Week of January 02, 2023
This week’s topic is “Nourishing Intention”. Intention plays a key role in meditation practice, as well as in many areas of our lives. During this week of practice we will explore what supports the setting of wholesome intentions, and what supports sustaining them in ways that nourish well-being for ourselves, others and the world.
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Daily Meditation Recordings, with Jaya Rudgard – Week of 21 April, 2025
We’re delighted to have Jaya Rudgard guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May these sessions support and deepen your practice.
This week’s theme is: Still Here, Still Now: Waking Up to Life
As we develop our ability to remain present to experience our insight into the nature of that experience deepens. We’ll continue to explore this week how mindfulness can lead not just to less stress here and now but to the kind of seeing that will eventually free the heart-mind from all its self-created suffering.
Our Dharma Library thrives through collective generosity. Your donation helps sustain this offering for our entire community.
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Intimacy and infinity: beyond inner and outer.
Recorded :
April 26, 2015 WorldwideInsight.org’s founding teacher Martin Aylward explores the tension we tend to feel between inner experience and outer engagement, self and world, being and doing. Martin leads a guided meditation and offer teachings on cultivating an inclusive practice, where our contact, curiosity and care go to whatever arises, whether ‘in here’ or ‘out there’.
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Daily Meditation Recordings, with Antonia Sumbundu and Christopher Titmuss – Week of 27 October, 2025
We’re delighted to have Antonia Sumbundu guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May these sessions support and deepen your practice.
This week’s theme is: Awakening Courage: Embracing Being, Belonging, and Becoming
A week of morning meditations to awaken the heart’s quiet, natural courage. Through presence, reflection, and stillness, these sessions invite us to rest in being – gently returning to awareness itself; to open into belonging – feeling our inseparable connection with the web of life; and to trust our becoming – the unfolding of wisdom and love through all that we do.
In the rhythm of being, belonging, and becoming, we are invited to live with authenticity, tenderness, and wholehearted courage.
Our Dharma Library thrives through collective generosity. Your donation helps sustain this offering for our entire community.
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Relief – In This Very Moment, In This Very Breath
Recorded :
April 21, 2019 Practicing mindfulness together with the four Divine Abidings (loving kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity), we develop our ability to bring relief to even the most challenging moments of our lives. We begin by strengthening our habit to increase our mindfulness as stress increases and then apply the Divine Abiding that is most appropriate for a…
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Daily Meditation Recordings, with Leela Sarti – Week of April 18, 2022
This week’s theme is “Timeless Presence in Daily Life: Being Yourself, Being at Home”. This week we will be exploring the possibility of being grounded in the depth of timeless presence in the midst of daily life. How to live a full life from silence and emptiness? How can we feel at home in our own skin and in the very circumstances of our life? How can we awaken an awareness and a heart that embraces life, dukkha and beyond? The grace of presence reveals the possibility of settling in reality and living with ease.
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