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

The Dharma of Homecoming in Times of Fear

With Lama Rod Owens recorded on July 26, 2020.

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

Maya Angelou once wrote: “The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” James Baldwin reflected: “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” In The Wiz, Stephanie Mills sang: “When I think of home I think of place where there’s love overflowing.”

No matter how we think of home, it is a place that many of us need. The needing of a place called home is the needing to be in a place where we are safe and taken care of. Home is the experience of taking refuge in something that restores us through love. Homecoming is opening to how home is calling us into being held and cared for.

In this teaching, we will be moving through mindfulness practice, heart based practices, pranayama (energy breath practice), and benefactor practice to explore the profound path of homecoming in these times of fear and uncertainty.

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

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Abandoning the Future – Caring for All Days to Come

    To care for our lives, the lives of all beings and the earth is all at the heart of what it means to be a human being. Yet, speculating about the future, and tensing up in fearful anticipation of days to come, are not skillful expressions of care and wisdom. There is a better way….

    Read More

  • The Surgeon’s Probe: Healing with Mindfulness

    Vince writes: “I am continuously inspired by some of the images that the Buddha offers us of ‘Sati’ or ‘Mindfulness’. This talk for Worldwide Insight is an exploration of some the many aspects of mindfulness – or in my case a lack of mindfulness – that continue to play themselves out in my life. In…

    Read More

  • Deborah Eden Tull - Senior Dharma Teacher

    Receptivity: Deep Listening as an Antidote to Reactivity and Violence

    In these hyped up divisive times, there is an ever-greater need for tools to de-condition ourselves from reactivity. The practice of listening – within ourselves and with others – is much more significant than we often acknowledge. The contrast of receptivity against the backdrop of a world conditioned to impose, label, judge, and solve, is…

    Read More

  • Kittisaro

    Exploring dukkha.

    Worldwide Insight talk from Kittisaro: “Exploring Dukkha”. Guided meditation, Dharma talk and Q&A.

    Read More

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Ulla Koenig – Week of January 15, 2024

    This week’s theme is “Tending to Fire – An Exploration of the Third Noble Truth”. The third of the four noble truths, which the Buddha offered as a framework, invites us to reflect on ways to tend to the inner fires or urges, which we all experience. ‘Nirodha’ is a concept which invites us to explore ways to handle that fire: to contain it, to create safe space around it and not to fuel it further, so that it eventually expires. This week, we explore concepts like ‘freedom of/from/to’ as well as letting go and letting be.

    Read More

  • Nirmala Werner

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nirmala Werner – Week of Nov 1, 2021

    This week’s theme is “Embodied Metta – The Body as a Pathway to Freedom”.

    The Buddha’s teachings invite us to be with things as they are. This week, we’ll learn embodiment practices to help us cultivate true love, compassion and care for ourselves and for others. We’ll practice staying intimate with our body, mind and heart in daily life, in sexuality, and with (often unwanted) thoughts, feelings and emotions.

    Read More

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Milla Gregor – Week of June 20, 2022

    This week’s topic is Skills for Inner and Outer Transformation. Dharma practice gives us great tools for inner and interpersonal change. It’s empowering to explore how these can also be useful for social and environmental transformation. We will tour such qualities, including equanimity (upekkha), non-self (anatta), and sukha (yes, pleasure!). Together, we will draw on both traditional and more contemporary voices to show how your skills as a practitioner could be vital to the work of changing the world.

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Martin Aylward – Week of March 30

    We’re fortunate that Martin Aywlard has generously offered to lead our daily meditation sessions for Europe and the UK. To find out more about Martin, and to view his other contributions to Sangha Live, click here. Monday, March 30 Being in the body Wednesday, April 1 The elements of bodily life Friday, April 3 Being…

    Read More