If you seek to deepen in your meditation practice, there is no better friend than the body. Like a venerable teacher, the body has the power to draw you into the present moment, show you how to find stillness and even—if you listen closely—wake you up.
Discover more from the Dharma Library
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Changing the Channel: Opening to Goodness
Recorded :
January 7, 2024 The barrage of frightening headlines often leaves us with feelings of despair, hopelessness, and negativity. While it’s important to feel connected to the suffering all around us, it is equally important to nourish ourselves by opening to the goodness in life–both inside and around us. Our caring can then be held with more spaciousness and…
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Sustaining Ourselves with Joy
Recorded :
May 16, 2021 The Buddha taught about many forms of joy as both the path of practice and its fruit. In this session, we’ll explore the practice and discipline of cultivating and savoring joy in our life and our practice. Joy is an important balancing factor as we honestly face the suffering of the world and commit to…
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Depth of Spiritual Practice – Even in a Chaotic World
Recorded :
November 3, 2019 “Practicing systematically, taking the time to go into deep practice and making it the number one priority, leads to a state where the mind is very still and malleable and can investigate.” – Nikki Mirghafori As the human race’s daily living pace continues to speed up and an increasing sense of insecurity and doubt arise…
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The Out Breath: Unlocking Concentration
Recorded :
June 16, 2024 Shodo Harada Roshi is known as a “teacher of teachers”, with masters from various lineages coming to sit with him in Japan. If you went to Harada’s monastery, the main meditation technique you’d learn involves slowing the out breath to last one minute. This drastically slows down your physiology, which in turn settles the mind.
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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.
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Light on the path: pleasure, joy, fulfilment and free-ness.
Recorded :
September 24, 2017 Our founding and guiding teacher Martin Aylward reflects on the importance of being nourished and uplifted by our practice. He looks at the nature of happiness and our sometimes difficult relationship with pleasure; explore opening up to joy, and point to ways in which dharma practice is fulfilling and freeing.
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Forgiveness: The Practice of Returning to Love
Recorded :
September 14, 2025 A heart rooted in compassion longs to uplift and free all beings. Yet holding such a heart is not always easy. We stumble, we protect, we carry wounds. In our time together, we’ll explore forgiveness as an act of self-compassion-a way to meet our own suffering with kindness, and to restore the dignity that pain…
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Daily Meditation Recordings, with Martin Aylward – Week of 7 October, 2024
This week’s topic is “Emptiness and Fullness, the Dharma of Everyday Life”
Together we’ll embrace a week of practicing together, amidst whatever arises.
