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

Wake up to your Life: Cultivating Courage & Compassion in the Everyday

With Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison recorded on March 23, 2025.

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

Awakening to Life means harmonizing our values and our actions. Many of us merely go through the motions, sleepwalking through the hours, without actually feeling alive. Cultivating courage and joy entails slowing down, paying close attention, and practicing being fully engaged with what each moment has to offer. Koshin Sensei will share Zen teachings and down to earth contemplative practices designed to bring freshness, vitality, and curiosity to everyday life. Whether you are familiar with Zen Buddhism or simply open-minded, you can wake up to your life.

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

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Akincano M. Weber

    On Meeting Conflict and the Incompatible

    “When you can’t go forward, when you can’t go back, and when you can’t stand still – where do you go? This is your place of non-abiding. The things you love and the things you hate: these are your teachers.” – Ajahn Chah How do we perceive conflict? We often see it as disturbing, but…

    Read More

  • The Compass of Wise Intention

    In times marked socially by uncertainty, injustice, polarization, and sometimes overwhelm, in the midst of the typical personal joys and sorrows of our day to day experiences, it can be difficult to know how to act-or even how to keep the heart steady. The Buddha’s teaching on Wise Intention (sammā saṅkappa) offers a compass, a…

    Read More

  • Lama Rod Owens

    Love and Resiliency

    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…

    Read More

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Caverly Morgan – Week of May 25

    We’re very grateful to have Caverly Morgan hosting our Daily Meditation Series for North America. To find out more about Caverly, and to view her past recordings and contributions to Sangha Live, click here. Monday, May 25 Releasing conditioned processes of suffering (part 3) Wednesday, May 27 Knowing awareness, experiencing being Friday, May 29 Embracing…

    Read More

  • Miles Kessler

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Miles Kessler – Week of 21 July, 2025

    We’re grateful to have Miles Kessler guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May these sessions support and enrich your practice. This week’s theme is: Dharma Practice in a Polarized World: Moving from Dissonance to Resonance and Coherence. In this week of Daily Meditations, you are invited to join Miles in an exploration into how our inner conflicts mirror our relational conflicts, and how our relational conflicts mirror the conflicts we see in the world. You will learn how your practice evolving on the cushion is the same process for healing conflicts in the world.

    Read More

  • A Relational Dhamma Integrates the Arahat and Bodhisattva Visions of the Buddhist Path (and why this matters to our living Dhamma path)

    Gregory writes: “The early Buddhist vision of the arahat ideal is sometimes taken to imply that individual awakening is the sole aim of the Path whereas the later Buddhist vision of the bodhisattva ideal centers on the liberation of all beings. The gap between practice aimed at solitary awakening and practice aimed at liberation of…

    Read More