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

The Radical Heart

With Thanissara recorded on May 19, 2019.

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

It’s hard to find the words that do justice to the enormity of the heartbreak we are in. As we wake up to our new reality, we feel grief, fear, outrage, and a daily kaleidoscope of reactions as we witness the dying of our beautiful planet.

Our Dharma practice is for this, to meet reality. To know peace and equanimity, even in the midst of a world on fire, and to have the ability to turn pain to strength, confusion to clarity and overwhelm to focus. As we practice a deeper listening, we begin to find an enduring, free heart that can love, regardless, within an authentic and increasingly radical response.

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

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Martin Aylward – Week of 06 October, 2025

    We’re honored to have Martin Aylward offering our Daily Meditation sessions this week. We hope they are nourishing for your practice.

    This week’s theme is: Embracing Complexity and Contradiction

    A week of exploring and cultivating a life and practice of radical open-heartedness

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

    Read More

  • Simplicity: The Heart of the Dharma

    Simplicity underlies Dharma practice. It’s common that when people begin to meditate, even if they have a full life with a job and family, they begin to realize that simplicity is a deep value. Pursuing conventional goals feels less meaningful or satisfying than finding ease and straightforwardness in our approach to life. Simplicity cuts across…

    Read More

  • Illness, death, urgency and love.

    Yes, the Buddha repeatedly recommended that each of us contemplate our own aging, illness and death. But what gap do you feel between an abstract contemplation and the actuality of this fragile and limited life? With death rolling in like a mountain, quickly and from all sides, do you feel any samvega, or sense of…

    Read More

  • Lisa Ernst

    How to Recharge Your Practice with a Tried and True Inquiry

    Even if you’ve been meditating for years, you probably encounter old patterns that seem impervious to your mindful awareness. Maybe at times these patterns are dormant, but during challenging moments they reappear and perhaps feel intractable. In this session we’ll explore inquiry practices that can help interrupt and disentangle the mind from its habitual “stuck”…

    Read More