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

Simplicity: The Heart of the Dharma

With Kim Allen recorded on July 21, 2024.

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

Simplicity underlies Dharma practice. It’s common that when people begin to meditate, even if they have a full life with a job and family, they begin to realize that simplicity is a deep value. Pursuing conventional goals feels less meaningful or satisfying than finding ease and straightforwardness in our approach to life. Simplicity cuts across the physical, verbal, and mental realms, and enables the deep seeing that can free the mind. In our session, we’ll explore simplicity as an act of kindness and wisdom, and also an expression of liberation, so needed in today’s world.

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

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    Embracing Ambiguity: In What we Believe, How we Love and Who we Think we Are

    “Things are not as they seem, and nor are they otherwise” – Lankavatara Sutra. We easily get seduced by certainty – thinking we really know what we want, what we believe, and who we think we are. Yet Dharma teachings invite us to hold experience lightly, without reducing our knowing to narrow certainty; retaining a…

    Read More

  • The Power of Everyday Mindfulness

    In this talk, Rhonda will offer guidance on transferring insights gained from meditation directly into easeful and ethical daily living. She will emphasize practicing for grounding in generosity and belonging, for minimizing automatic, reactive behaviors…

    Read More

  • The Ardent Heart: Remembering Why We Practice

    I almost called this session “Loving the Dharma, Forgetting to Sit.” Before meditating, we’re often invited to remember our intention, then move on within seconds. In this session we’ll stay with that question, using early Buddhist teachings, a bit of…

    Read More

  • Love & Boundaries

    Our practice cultivates qualities of boundless love, whether through loving kindness practice, or opening to the love inherent in deep states of awareness. But can we really love everyone boundlessly? What about political leaders who may be causing tremendous suffering? Or when our boundaries get crossed in any way—personally, at work, in our families, or…

    Read More

  • George Haas

    The meaningful life

    How can we use our meditation practice to repair attachment disturbances caused by our early conditioning, so that we can be completely ourselves in our relationships with others and in our work, as we pursue the path of awakening?

    Read More

  • Love in the Time of Extinction: Dharma Practice and the Climate Emergency

    This was a special Worldwide Insight session in which Martin Aylward and Yanai Postelnik were in conversation about the climate emergency and how to engage with it from a Dharma perspective. Prior to the session, Yanai wrote: “I know there are many in our worldwide sangha, who like myself have engaged with, or are considering…

    Read More

  • Communication, Clarity and Consequences

    Everything that we write matters. Everything that comes out of our mouth matters. Important communications require calm and insightful reflection afterwards. Wisdom and Liberation of the voice support each other. Clear communication with another (spoken or written) expresses itself freely from the extremes of positivity and negativity. The middle way shows itself in exploration of…

    Read More