The pursuit of freedom and happiness in the Buddha’s journey holds significant relevance to our own lives, particularly during challenging times. Embracing uncertainty, stepping out of our comfort zones, maintaining integrity, and risking it all for the love of the Dharma are just a few aspects of his path. What if we were to perceive our lives as a noble quest as well? How can we draw inspiration and learn from the Buddha’s journey to inform our own? Let us explore these questions together.
Discover more from the Dharma Library
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Daily Meditation Recordings, with Martin Aylward – Week of 6 – 10 November, 2023
This week’s topic is “Everything to Lose, Nothing to Fear”
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Faith and confidence: the first spiritual faculty.
Recorded :
September 4, 2016 Faith, confidence, and trust are English translations for the Pali term saddhā. In this talk, Shaila Catherine explores the cultivation of saddhā as an aid to awakening and as the first in the list of spiritual faculties that include faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom.
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Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nirmala Werner – Week of May 27 – 31, 2024
This week’s topic is “Mindfulness of the nervous system: transforming fear, struggle and separation into love and connection”. We humans are social animals and need each other to feel safe and secure, to grow and to nourish ourselves. How can we live with a sense of connection, loving-kindness, and inner family? Our meditation practice allows us to take a break between stimulus and response. When we come into contact with our loved ones, we all too easily lose the inner freedom we think we have achieved and avoid our difficulties, also called spiritual bypassing. This week we explore what supports us to react flexibly to the internal and external world, to relax and to allow closeness and real intimacy. We will look into the first foundation of mindfulness, mindfulness of the body, including harmonizing the body formations and nervous system to meet our difficulties with gentleness.
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The Out Breath: Unlocking Concentration
Recorded :
June 16, 2024 Shodo Harada Roshi is known as a “teacher of teachers”, with masters from various lineages coming to sit with him in Japan. If you went to Harada’s monastery, the main meditation technique you’d learn involves slowing the out breath to last one minute. This drastically slows down your physiology, which in turn settles the mind.
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Embracing the First Noble Truth: Dukkha and Destructive Emotions
Recorded :
January 24, 2021 Coming to terms with the teaching and implications of the first noble truth can be challenging, confusing and ongoing. When we are unable to do the hard work of completing the task of the first truth, to embrace Dukkha, we become vulnerable to destructive emotions.
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Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nirmala Werner – Week of 22 September, 2025
We’re grateful to have Nirmala Werner guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May they support and deepen your practice.
This week’s theme is: The Still Heart: Cultivating Equanimity in an Unsteady World
In a world marked by constant change, uncertainty, and emotional intensity, equanimity can seem like a distant ideal-or even a form of indifference. But in the Buddhist tradition, equanimity (upekkhā) is not cold or passive. It is the spacious, steady heart that knows how to stay open, grounded, and present with whatever life brings.
In this week we will explore equanimity as a deep source of inner freedom-neither detached nor reactive, but wise, loving, and awake.
Through daily reflection and embodied practice, we will ask:
What is true equanimity, and what is it not?
How can we meet change without losing our ground?
How do we love and let go-at the same time?
And how can we live with a still heart in a restless world?
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How to Recharge Your Practice with a Tried and True Inquiry
Recorded :
October 22, 2023 Even if you’ve been meditating for years, you probably encounter old patterns that seem impervious to your mindful awareness. Maybe at times these patterns are dormant, but during challenging moments they reappear and perhaps feel intractable. In this session we’ll explore inquiry practices that can help interrupt and disentangle the mind from its habitual “stuck”…
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Inner Peace – Even in a Chaotic World
Recorded :
July 21, 2019 “Anyone can build a house of wood and bricks, but the Buddha taught that that is not our real home. Our real home is inner peace.” – Ajahn Chah How can you possibly experience inner peace at a time when human-kind and our planet appears to be tumbling deeper into “chaos”? Can inner peace even…
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