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

  • Deborah Eden Tull - Senior Dharma Teacher

    You are Not Alone: Healing the Myth of Separation

    The dharma invites us to face ourselves fully. But through fear, we sometimes distract ourselves, over-fill ourselves, and hold onto external attachments, in order to avoid.…what? The illusion that we are separate and isolated manifests in ways conscious and unconscious, but over time practice reveals to us that it is simply the ego that fears…

    Read More

  • Christelle Bonneau

    How can I Sink when I am the Ocean?

    In this session we explore more precisely the different individuals we think we are through the days. We will try to recognize them better, with their own feelings, sensations, emotions, thoughts and states of mind. We’ll also try to hear more clearly all the different judgemental voices that take place in us, about the way…

    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

  • The Happiness of a Liberated Heart

    What is pleasure and what is happiness? Why is my pursuit of happiness not working? Is there any lasting happiness? Together we inquire into the nature of happiness. We reflect on different attempts in our lives to find happiness and what stops us from being contented. Inspired by the Buddha’s own quest for a genuine…

    Read More

  • Ayya Santussika

    Choices – The Ones that Matter and the Ones that Don’t

    How many choices will you make today? Which ones are likely to lead to happiness and which to suffering? Often we have many more options than we think we do. The Buddha’s teachings offer clear guidance on how to make choices that help us develop our habits, our character, and our karma in a way…

    Read More

  • Deborah Eden Tull - Senior Dharma Teacher

    Endarkenment: Embracing the Medicine of Light and Dark

    As we enter the darker months of the year, consider the profound restoration and healing that darkness offers us— both physically and symbolically. Darkness is often considered the absence of light, but it is actually a vital and regenerative essence of nature and consciousness. This session is an experiential exploration of the interplay of light…

    Read More