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

The full range of the heart.

With Martin Aylward recorded on December 18, 2016.

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

We call this ‘the season of goodwill’. A reminder to care for one another, and to wish each other well. This year, we find ourselves in more need of understanding and expressing our common humanness than ever. We use this week’s session to honour the human heart; to reflect together on both how we respond to the dukkha of the world, and how we love; how we experience and cultivate the infinite potential of the free heart.

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

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Patience: In Praise of an Undervalued Helper

    Patience can be one of those qualities which we think of as being theoretically helpful but feel little motivation to actually cultivate and strengthen. So much emphasis in our busy world of achieving goals and getting tasks done is about doing, taking action and fixing problems. We will spend this session exploring the benefits of…

    Read More

  • Wise Resolve: Finding Inner Strength

    In an effort to counter tendencies towards striving and over-achieving, many Western approaches to meditation and spirituality emphasize relaxation. While relaxation and ease are essential ingredients on the meditative path, they must be integrated with whole-hearted effort. How do we find inner strength and make a clear resolve that is informed by wisdom and balanced…

    Read More

  • Daigan Gaither

    Living by Vow

    If we start with the understanding that everyone is living by vow, how can we examine what vows we are following and change to follow the ones that lead to liberation?

    Read More

  • Uncertainty, Stability & Love: Everything Comes With Everything

    Life is never only good or only bad, pleasant or unpleasant, comfortable or uncomfortable, just or unjust. Cultivating a wide spacious perspective within the reality of uncertainty gives rise to a bigger capacity to meet our lives more gently, kindly, and clearly, with more stability and more love. Join us as we explore perspectives and practices to…

    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

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Ayala Gill – Week of 02 June, 2025

    We’re delighted to have Ayala Gill guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May these sessions support and deepen your practice.

    This week’s theme is: The Body is a Doorway to Love

    Through relating to the elements of the body, we cultivate a presence that is grounded, awake, open, relaxed and spacious.
    As the body becomes a more stable home for the heart and mind, everything settles and softens back to its natural state of aliveness and love.

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

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Zohar Lavie – Week of September 5, 2022

    This week’s topic is “Awakening into Experience Here and Now”. “You shouldn’t chase after the past
    or place expectations on the future.
    What is past
    is left behind.
    The future
    is as yet unreached.
    Whatever quality is present
    you clearly see right there,
    right there.
    Not taken in,
    unshaken,
    that’s how you develop the heart.” (MN 131)

    The essence of the Buddha’s teachings lies in these words. Unshakability and freedom are at the heart of awakening, they are what we cultivate in our practice. This week we will practice turning to our experience in ways that wake us up, right here and now.

    Read More

  • Stephen Fulder

    Equanimity: Dancing with the Unexpected

    Equanimity is a key spiritual faculty which allows us to face the known and the unknown, the ecstasies and the despairs, with steadiness and lightness. Equanimity helps us engage with life from an unlimited and interconnected perspective. The Buddhist image is of an island in the stormy seas – remembering that all islands are connected…

    Read More