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

  • Kaira Jewel Lingo

    Honoring our ancestors, healing our ancestors.

    As we prepare for Halloween and All Souls Day, we explore how we can practice the wisdom of interbeing to help us nurture the wholesome seeds our ancestors transmitted to us and transform the unwholesome habit energies we have received from them.

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    Feeling the blessings of your life.

    We are easily and often exposed to the greed, hatred and delusion that easily directs our own minds, and seems to be running the world. Yet whatever our personal circumstances, there is much we can appreciate and be grateful for. In this session, Martin explores the quality of appreciation – mudita – as a way…

    Read More

  • Is there compassion for the self? Go deep. Is compassion the end of self?

    The Dharma flies with two wings – compassion and wisdom. Compassion emerges from a liberated wisdom. That happens when constructs in the mind lose their significance. The emptiness of self and the emptiness of dependency on feeling tones take priority. This talk also explores the contraction of compassion into self interest. The liberation of compassion…

    Read More

  • Yahel Avigur

    Daily Meditation Recordings with Yahel Avigur – Week of September 30, 2024

    This week’s topic is “Samadhi: A Path of Reliable Joy”. One of the central lines in the teachings of the Buddha, the practice of Samadhi is the skill of harmonized, gathered presence. It is based on mindfulness and discernment, leading to deepening wisdom. In this week of practice, we will cultivate a set of meditative skills that lead to such reliable joy.

    Read More

  • The Conscientious Heart: An exploration of Appamada and the Elephant’s Footprint

    We will explore through practice and teachings the importance of “appamada” or heedfulness, conscientiousness, or what Stephen Batchelor has translated as care. Appamada has been called the path to the deathless. ” Just as the footprints of all living beings with legs can be encompassed by the footprint of the elephant, and the elephant’s footprint is…

    Read More