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

Skillful Ways to Work with Difficult Thoughts in Meditation

With Lisa Ernst recorded on November 21, 2021.

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

There’s a misconception that thoughts are a hindrance to deep meditation and tranquility. Especially during this ongoing challenging time, certain thoughts may be persistent and difficult to release. Yet, thoughts themselves are not the problem; it’s our relationship to them that determines whether or not they impede our meditation. In this session, we will explore a number of skillful ways to work with difficult or persistent thoughts in meditation to support inner well-being and clarity.

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

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Ayala Gill – Week of March 18, 2024

    This week’s topic is “Love’s Flavours and Flow”. Love never leaves us. It’s already here in each thought, sight, taste, smell, sound, sensation and movement. Love is already here, resting beside each pain, celebrating each delight and expanding into the great unknown with infinite patience and warmth. Love effortlessly flows into giving and receiving, and mysteriously radiates in wordless Being. Love’s presence is known in the moment we choose to recognise, allow and participate in the dance of its ongoing flavours and flow.

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Zohar Lavie – Week of May 1, 2023

    This week’s topic is “A Path of Wisdom and Compassion”. Practicing Insight Meditation supports an understanding of how wellbeing is nourished, and how ill-being is conditioned. Attending to our own heart and mind with compassion and wisdom opens possibilities of freedom. Over this week of practice, we’ll develop wisdom and compassion, exploring creative responses to habits that appear to obscure these beautiful qualities.

    Read More

  • Ralph Steele

    A Skilful Dance: The Three Characteristics Of Life and The Winds of Dharma

    (Please note that, due to problems with the video streaming platform on the day of this session, this talk was unfortunately not recorded in its entirety.) In this session Ralph explores using the Winds of Dharma to gain insight into the Three Characteristics of Life. The ocean of consciousness can be equated to life’s characteristics…

    Read More

  • A Relational Dhamma Integrates the Arahat and Bodhisattva Visions of the Buddhist Path (and why this matters to our living Dhamma path)

    Gregory writes: “The early Buddhist vision of the arahat ideal is sometimes taken to imply that individual awakening is the sole aim of the Path whereas the later Buddhist vision of the bodhisattva ideal centers on the liberation of all beings. The gap between practice aimed at solitary awakening and practice aimed at liberation of…

    Read More

  • Nirmala Werner

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nirmala Werner – Week of 17 March, 2025

    We are delighted to have Nirmala Werner guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. This week’s theme is: Sacred Body, Sacred Path: Feminine Principles on the Spiritual Journey. This week, we explore the profound role of the feminine principle on the spiritual journey in Buddhism. We will engage in embodied practices, examining the qualities of the elements and nature, while opening ourselves to what truly serves us on our path to awakening. Where does our practice lead us when we open to an embrace of life, seeing all experience as sacred?

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    An Open Heart in Hell

    After a summer of extreme heat, drought and fire, we may well enter the autumn wondering how to manage the grief at our fragile and collapsing ecology. Taking the title An Open Heart in Hell from Nick Mulvey’s recent song “Prayer of my Own“, we’ll use this session to honour the pains of the heart without getting…

    Read More