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

  • Jill Satterfield

    The Procurement of Kindness and Sanity

    Jill writes: “We all possess the capacity to be very aware of our internal landscapes of body, heart and mind. And fortunately, with practice, we can tend to what we see, feel and know as it all arises in the moment, rather than days, months or decades later. It sure saves a lot of pain…

    Read More

  • Responding to a World in Crisis with a Strong Heart

    How do we keep the heart open and strong amidst so much pain and suffering in our world? What does our contemplative practice have to offer in times of upheaval and change? Join author and Dharma teacher Oren Jay Sofer for this session focused on building inner resources to heal our hearts and respond effectively…

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    Pathways to Happiness

    Being human includes feeling great and feeling pain; given the changing nature of experience what kind of happiness is possible for us? Can we cultivate freedom, happiness and contentment that are less reliant on things ‘going our way’? The attitudes of goodwill, care and friendliness are some of our greatest allies in practice, and also…

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    Ask Me Anything: Everything You Wanted to Know about Dharma, but were too Embarrassed / Deluded / Enlightened to Ask

    In this session, Martin opened up to dharma questions from the Sangha. He invited questions that were personal or impersonal, about technical aspects of Buddhism or the wider field of Dharma practice, about anything between heaven and earth including both; about life, love and liberation; work, sex, money, power; the depths of meditation and the…

    Read More

  • Ven. Pannavati Bikkhuni

    All Worldly Dharma is Buddha Dharma

    Nowadays, many Buddhist practitioners have mistaken views. Taking the false to be true, we can make some progress, but not much. Only in the light of wisdom can we awaken to the truth because it allows us to penetrate avidya — the karmic hindrance of non-understanding that is complicating our lives. Join us for a discussion…

    Read More