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

The practice of pleasure and delight (or the spiritual art of having fun).

With Martin Aylward recorded on April 22, 2018.

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

Dharma teachings importantly emphasise suffering, compassion, renunciation, desire, non-reactivity, peacefulness. All these are potent themes, yet ones which can make our practice feel overly heavy, unnecessarily serious, maybe even uptight!

Dharma practice equally points us towards a playful nature, light-heartedness and ease, delight and the capacity to really enjoy life. Especially when we can get bogged down in the circumstantial reality of both our personal struggles and of world affairs, we need uplift for the heart. Joy as resilience. A buoyant heart, that though it may get pushed under, cannot be sunk.

In this class, our founding teacher Martin reflects on ways to cultivate that buoyancy, to explore our capacity for pleasure, to enjoy the gift of life.

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

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Shaila Catherine

    Beyond Distraction: Five Practical Ways to Focus the Mind

    Shaila will be sharing teachings from her new book, Beyond Distraction. This talk will introduce five pragmatic strategies to help you overcome distraction in meditation and develop clarity in relationships, work, and daily life. The strategies are: replacing, examining, ignoring, investigating, and resolving. You can learn to unlock the incredible capacities of your mind to think…

    Read More

  • Brian Dean Williams

    S.A.L.S.A.: Using Buddhist practice to Respond to “Spicy” Emotions

    Life presents plenty of opportunities to react unconsciously, often creating harm for ourselves and others. How might we apply our Buddhist practice to “Spicy” situations and emotions, in order to respond wisely? In this session, Brian will draw on Stephen Batchelor’s work and propose a working acronym of “S.A.L.S.A.” to navigate life’s spiciness and act…

    Read More

  • The ‘Self’ is Insubstantial

    Humans live in the spell of the self, as if it had substantial existence.
    Dharma offers a reflection/meditation/inquiry into this phenomenon.
    One who asks ‘Who Wakes Up?’ lives in the spell.
    Teaching will offer ways to a non-intellectual realisation of emptiness of self.
    Be devoted to this in daily life – until obvious as seeing colour for one with sound eyesight.
    To wake up from the dream of self is liberating.

    Read More

  • Sitting with Pointlessness – Living with Potentiality

    During a recent retreat, the teachers’ instruction was to hold the question ‘What is this?’ in mind. While sitting on the cushion, the thought struck me that my life is futile! I am genetically programmed for survival and sex; everything else is just distracting window-dressing. This talk will explore the journey from the apparent ‘futility’…

    Read More

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Ulla Koenig – Week of July 19, 2021

    This week’s theme is: Identifying the Many Masks of the Inner Critic

    Often we think of the inner critic as the constant nagging inner discourse which dismisses our good qualities, questions our lovability, and our potential for goodness. Being a master/mistress of disguise, the inner critic takes on many forms; it wraps our decision making process in veils of doubt, pushes us into compulsive activity, traps us in paralysis, and distorts our views on others.

    Luckily, the Dharma path offers us tools to meet this painful heart-mind dynamic. This week we will practice summoning qualities like wisdom, kindness, equanimity, concentration, appreciation, compassion and inquiry, in order to meet our inner critic in a skilful way.

    Read More

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Milla Gregor – Week of 13 January, 2025

    We’re delighted to have Milla Gregor guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May they support and enrich your practice.

    This week’s theme is: How to respond to an unjust burning world (without losing your mind)

    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 May 30, 2022

    This week’s theme is: Bringing the Practice to Life. The Buddha’s teachings emphasise the whole of our lives as a rich ground for exploration and growth.  Through meditation, we cultivate skills and ways of relating that can be applied beyond formal meditation. This week we will explore bringing the practice to different areas and aspects of our lives. We will open to taste how this enlivens and rejuvenates our practice, and how it can nurture wellbeing for others and ourselves.

    Read More