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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Daily Meditation Recordings, with Yahel Avigur – Week of 14 July, 2025
We’re delighted to have Yahel Avigur guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May these sessions enrich and support your practice.
This week’s theme is: Metta — Healing All Aspects
This week, we’ll open to the healing power of metta – loving-kindness, or goodwill – as a transformative force in our lives. We’ll practice offering this gentle warmth first to those we naturally care about, and to ourselves. Gradually, we’ll widen the circle, allowing metta to infuse our relationships with neutral people, those we find difficult, and ultimately all beings. As kindness suffuses more corners of our hearts and lives, we may begin to discover a growing sense of spaciousness and connection – and with it, insight, balance, and inner freedom.
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Daily Meditation Recordings, with Christine Kupfer – Week of October 9, 2023
This week’s topic is “Presence: At the Heart of Everything, Free from Everything”. I first heard this phrase when I was a young student of Zen. Since then I have practiced it every day. It is a radical proposition, an invitation to live fully. Embodied presence is transformative, healing and liberating.
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Daily Meditation Recordings, with Miles Kessler – Week of July 29, 2024
This week’s topic is “Cutting Through To Ultimate Reality”. The word “Dhamma” means ultimate reality, the absolute, or universal principles. This refers to the 3 universal characteristics of conditioned phenomena, and to Nibbana, the unconditioned. In this week of practice we will explore how insight into the Dhamma arises in meditation, and get practical instructions to cultivate the conditions for “Cutting Through To Ultimate Reality”.
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Depth of Spiritual Practice – Even in a Chaotic World
Recorded :
November 3, 2019 “Practicing systematically, taking the time to go into deep practice and making it the number one priority, leads to a state where the mind is very still and malleable and can investigate.” – Nikki Mirghafori As the human race’s daily living pace continues to speed up and an increasing sense of insecurity and doubt arise…
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Two Wings to Fly – Cultivating Both Wisdom and Compassion
Recorded :
July 25, 2021 In traditional Theravada Buddhism it’s said that for one to truly experience freedom one needs to engage in the practices of both wisdom and compassion. Like a bird that needs two wings to fly, wisdom and compassion are two necessary parts on the path to a well-rounded enlightenment. At first glance, practices that cultivate loving-kindness…
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Becoming a Bodhisattva
Recorded :
November 9, 2025 This talk will explore the archetype of the Bodhisattva— a being dedicated to waking up and cultivating wisdom and compassion for the sake of all beings. We will first see how it manifests itself in Buddhist history and teachings, and then tackle important questions: How is it relevant to the suffering in our current times?…
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Surrendering to awareness.
Recorded :
April 10, 2016 Often in spiritual practice there is the encouragement to observe. From that place of observation we attempt to “be with” what arises. When does that intention get colonized by the ego? Who is it that is “being with”? What is it that is “being with”? What shifts in our practice when we surrender what is…
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Practicing for the love of it.
Recorded :
January 17, 2016 Before the session Martin wrote: “A Burmese teacher once told a friend of mine to always enjoy his practice. We love meditation in theory, and we want to grow and transform, and we certainly would like to be liberated from our suffering. And yet! We easily turn meditation into a chore, and feel discouraged by…
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