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

The Conscientious Heart: An exploration of Appamada and the Elephant’s Footprint

With Roshi Joan Halifax recorded on March 3, 2024.

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

We will explore through practice and teachings the importance of “appamada” or heedfulness, conscientiousness, or what Stephen Batchelor has translated as care. Appamada has been called the path to the deathless. ” Just as the footprints of all living beings with legs can be encompassed by the footprint of the elephant, and the elephant’s footprint is declared to be supreme among them in terms of its great size; in the same way, heedfulness is the one quality that keeps both kinds of benefits secure—benefits in this life & benefits in lives to come.” We actualize this blessed path.

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

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • The Happiness of Emptiness

    Exploration of ultimate teachings requires listening, reflection/meditation rather than sitting to wait for an experience. Emptiness does not require experiences. The ultimate reveals the emptiness of self, ego, I and my – including self interest, self help and self compassion. This session will explore the contractions forming self and the way our minds have become…

    Read More

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Milla Gregor – Week of 27 April, 2026

    This week’s theme is: Resources for the Path of Engaged Practice.

    Engaged practice combines dharma wisdom with justice and liberation movement wisdom, allowing us to fly with the wings of compassion and wisdom towards the better world we know is possible.

    This week we’ll dive into ideas, practices and poems from those on the engaged practice path, strengthening our ability to participate in building justice, liberation and joy both within and beyond our individual lives.

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

    Read More

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Ulla Koenig – Week of Feb 27, 2023

    This week’s theme is “Samadhi – Doors of Harmony”. The Buddha encouraged us to nourish, calm, gladden and liberate our heart-mind (citta). To know ways to inner harmony, stillness and contentment independently of outer circumstances is a precious resource. It contributes to resilience, allows steadiness in challenging situations with others and brings confidence into our lives. Yet the path towards samadhi can be easily misunderstood and contribute to more pressure and self-doubt. We dedicate this week to exploring kind and nourishing ways to practice.

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    Saddha: Unshakeable Confidence

    So many of us feel assailed by doubt, anxiety and insecurity. Unhelpful self-talk, along with the uncertainties of the world, heighten and reinforce thought tendencies. Dharma practice helps us recognize and uproot ingrained patterns, and also to establish trust, confidence and fearlessness. Our first Sunday Sangha of 2023 will inquire into what is deeply trustworthy, and point towards a confidence that is unshakeable — regardless of circumstance or preference, life or death.

    Read More

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of March 22, 2021

    This week’s theme is: Resolve to Unbind the Heart

    The word resolve can embody many meanings. This week we will see how much it offers on a Dharma path of awakening. It is made of re & solve: ‘re’ as in ‘really’, fully, with intensity; ’solve’ as in loosen, undo, or dissolve. Such a poetic and insightful combination: to intensely loosen.

    The Buddha offered teachings and practices for a path of unbinding. A path of resolve to resolve, of dedication to undoing. For dukkha is a state of high activity and reactivity: a doing of distress. Meditations are practices of skilful and subtle activity that unbuild problematic senses of self and loosen missions of reactivity. An invitation to wake up to life, in life, for life, and there in the midst of it all to resolve: to fully unbind.

    Read More

  • Nina la Rosa

    Dismantling Racism in Our Minds and Hearts

    If one lives as a human on this earth one is affected by racism. Power and privilege have been unfairly awarded throughout history to certain groups of people based on race while disempowering others. These systems function on a systemic and cultural level, but also within each of us individually when we unconsciously internalize messages…

    Read More