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

The Power of Relational Awareness

With Oren Jay Sofer recorded on September 9, 2018.

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

In this session, Oren Jay Sofer shares reflections on the basics of Mindful Communication, with particular focus on the internal foundations of successful communication. The talk explores some of the ways our silent contemplative practice can support our interpersonal relationships, while the Q&A delves into more specific issues of conversation and relationships.

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

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of 27 January, 2025

    We’re grateful to have Nathan Glyde guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May these sessions support and deepen your practice.

    This week’s theme is: Time For Life

    Dharma teachings invite a profound reduction in stress. When stress is present, there is a sense of time pressure, urgency, and haste. Conversely, when there is freedom and ease, our perception of time expands in countless ways. Dharma practice can be viewed as methods to significantly alter our sense of time, welcoming us into a well-paced connection that makes time for life.

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

    Read More

  • Miles Kessler

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Miles Kessler – Week of 19 January, 2026

    This week’s theme is: The Seven Stages of Purification in Insight Meditation

    The Seven Stages of Purification in Insight Meditation is a 5-day exploration of how insight naturally unfolds through practice, as described in the classical Theravāda map of purification. Each day will combine a short teaching with guided meditation, helping practitioners-whether new or experienced-recognize how challenge, insight, clarity, and release arise as part of a single, coherent developmental process. Rather than presenting the stages as goals to attain, this series offers them as an orienting framework: a way to understand what is already happening in your practice, normalize both ease and challenge, and cultivate confidence, patience, and continuity on the path of awakening.

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

    Read More

  • Shaila Catherine

    How Does Meditation Support the Path of Awakening?

    Scientists have documented some significant and measurable changes that occur as a result of meditation. But Buddhist practice is not limited to calm, pleasant, relaxing states of meditation. The liberating path includes a broad range of practices that produce a wide variety of benefits. We learn how we encounter the world of the senses; we…

    Read More

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Jaya Rudgard – Week of 07 April, 2025

    We are delighted to have Jaya Rudgard leading our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May they bring nourishment to your practice.

    This week’s theme is: Dharma Here and Now: The Art of Being Present

    As meditators we aspire to being awake to life. We know that this life with its gifts, challenges and opportunities, only ever happens NOW, yet this NOW often eludes us. This week we’ll investigate what helps and hinders our fully inhabiting the moments of our day, and what possibilities might emerge when we do so.

    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 09 June, 2025

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

    This week’s theme is: Steadiness, Clarity and Care in Challenging Times

    During this week of practice, we will explore and practice the boundless qualities of compassion and equanimity. Compassion as the heart’s capacity to open and attend to suffering, and equanimity as the heart’s ability to face life in all its aspects with clarity and steadiness.
    These two beautiful qualities complement and nourish each other. They support us to meet experience and act within it in beneficial ways, even in difficult times.

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

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    Visions of a free life

    Freedom is a central concern of all our lives, yet has many different manifestations, some of which run completely contrary to others. This class will explores the importance of social freedoms, inner freedom, personal and collective freedoms. We explore how different perspectives on free-ness shape how we practice; and how we understand life and our…

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    The Wisdom of No Escape

    Our lives include facing things we didn’t choose, and often cannot change; such as getting ill or injured, or loosing something or someone that we love. Dharma teachings invite us to turn towards these, instead of turning away from them. What is the wisdom that is available to us when we meet our experience with…

    Read More

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Ayala Gill – Week of 04 November, 2024

    This week’s theme is: Love’s Fullness

    Mindfulness is a practice of remaining present, open and loving to the deepest truth of this moment as it arises and dissolves. It invites us into an intimate, warm and embodied relationship with life, where each moment is sensed, felt and known with love. The four foundations of mindfulness return us to love’s fullness.

    Read More