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

Search Sangha Live

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

  • Tenku Ruff Osho

    What Can I Do to Help?! I’m At My Limit!

    Recorded : May 15, 2022

    Sometimes as much as we want to help, we feel stuck. When we see children suffering and grandmothers crying in Ukraine, our hearts break, but the enormity of suffering feels like more than we can bear. How can we meet this wall, especially when our own personal resources are low? In this talk, I’ll teach…

    Read More

  •

    Surrendering the Clever Mind into the Listening Heart

    Recorded : February 14, 2021

    As our deepening poly-crises shift us from a sense of predictability, stability, and even a future, into crisis management as a daily norm, how can our practice support inner resilience and a meaningful response? We will touch on Dharma practices and teachings that support the internal shifts needed as we transition from over-reliance on separative…

    Read More

  • Deborah Eden Tull - Senior Dharma Teacher

    The extraordinary nature of ordinary self

    Recorded : May 24, 2017

    It is an extraordinary relief to encounter the perfection of ordinary self in a world that is screaming loudly, “There is something better out there! There is something you might be missing! There are standards you need to meet! There is something more you need to prove!” As we remember our inherent goodness, we cease…

    Read More

  • Eugene Cash

    Self and Not-Self: Who (What) are You?

    Recorded : October 25, 2020

    This talk explores classic Buddhist teachings about anatta: self and not-self as well highlighting how other traditions and modalities recognized self and what it means to be free from self. We investigate self and not-self through spiritual, poetic cultural and personal perspectives.

    Read More

  • Norman Blair

    Settling Into Your Body In Meditation – December 2023

    Recorded : December 17, 2023

    Finding a comfortable body posture when meditating is a crucial element in our practice. We can use our bodies as a way of experiencing change and impermanence. Each time is different. In this session we will be looking at ways to make our bodies comfortable for meditation – both standing (if appropriate for your body)…

    Read More

  •

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Leela Sarti – Week of 24 March, 2025

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

    This week’s theme is: Entering the Timeless

    We often live caught in a charged and time bound perspective: I need to use my time! I don’t have enough time! time is running out! But as human beings we can also re-discover that time is malleable and through practice, the act of sacred awareness, relax into a sense of no time, deep time and all time.

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

    Read More