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 interest and compassion? What can we learn from opening to the “in-escapable” aspects of the human condition?
This week’s topic is “Embracing challenging emotions”. There are no negative emotions, only ones that we find challenging to embrace, like anxiety, anger, grief and fear. When we relate to them in distorted ways, their expression is indeed negative. Over this week (at a time of year where they may be particularly triggered!) we will explore how to come into a sacred relationship with each of these challenging emotions.
This week’s theme is: The Abundant Middle-Way.
The Buddha in his last steps of awakening turned away from austerities and the practiced hardships he had endured. He did not turn back to the indulgences of his youth, but uncovered a kind and sensitive middle-way between a sense of self-importance and self-negation. The awakened one then invited others to a way of living between common extremes of views, states, and habitual actions.
This week we will walk the path of peace supporting the deep well-being and boundless heart of the middle-way.
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We start a new year. It is 2020. Perhaps the intensity of environmental dramas in 2019 finally made clear to many people the vulnerabilities to life on Earth. It might be useful to make a New Year’s resolution that lasts longer than a week. Here are four considerations. 1. Dedicate an hour a day or…
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Let’s not flinch when we look at the lived experiences of illness, confusion, and relational pain. Let’s allow the texture of hurt to be known. Awareness remains brilliant, for sure. Any of us can experience this. Maybe the more we allow the blunt pain of the body-mind, the more we can sit squarely in awareness….
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The world is unsteady and chaotic. We find ourselves struggling in a pandemic that has completely disrupted our lives. Many of us are being confronted with the reality of death in a way we thought we never would. In the face of all this, it is hard to maintain our physical and emotional balance. Resiliency…
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You may have noticed that sometimes breaking old patterns is hard to do! But thanks to surviving ancient Buddhist teachings, we are NOT doomed to being stuck in the rut of the same old painful behavioral and cognitive patterns, and we can create new helpful patterns. This talk explores the nature of the conditioned mind…
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Most people associate Dharma practice with the concept of Wisdom. Here, the idea is that we need to “know” something that we don’t already know. For English thinking minds this can become very problematic and can turn our practice into a cognitive or intellectual endeavor. With the earliest teachings of the Dharma we see that…
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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.