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.
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.
Discover more from the Dharma Library
-
Intimacy and infinity: beyond inner and outer.
Recorded :
April 26, 2015 WorldwideInsight.org’s founding teacher Martin Aylward explores the tension we tend to feel between inner experience and outer engagement, self and world, being and doing. Martin leads a guided meditation and offer teachings on cultivating an inclusive practice, where our contact, curiosity and care go to whatever arises, whether ‘in here’ or ‘out there’.
-
Bodhisattva Practice
Recorded :
June 23, 2024 Using the hagiography of the Bodhisattvas of Compassion, Wisdom, and Activity, let’s explore how to bring those ideals into our everyday life off the cushion. What can these perfections of compassion, wisdom and activity teach us about our own journey to practice-realization, and liberation.
-
Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of Jan 3, 2022
This week’s topic is: Beginning to See More Possibilities.
The Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki, said: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” With a beginner’s possibilities we can release our heart’s wholesome aspirations. Let’s engender a beginners spirit, and manifest our innate potential for freedom and well-being: embodying a saint’s patience to start again; an adventurer’s openness to step out of constricted views; and a creative’s zeal to reimagine ourselves and our world”
-
Dancing with Dukkha and Sukha: Meeting the 10,000 joys and sorrows of our daily lives
Recorded :
May 7, 2023 In this ever-changing landscape of living, the buddha dharma and psychological inquiry offer us skillful ways to pause and soften into the things that bring pain and suffering, while also reminding us to fully embrace the many contentments and connections life also beautifully and innocently offers. In our time together, Sarah will invite us to…
-
Dancing with the Devil – Coming Home in the Midst of our Emotional Storms
Recorded :
June 27, 2021 There is a big emphasis in our society on doing good and being right. But rather than trying harder, being perfect and becoming a “better person” what about embracing ourselves just as we are, with all of our emotions — with our light, and with our shadow? In this talk we explore an all-inclusive approach…
-
Why Meditate?
Recorded :
February 18, 2024 Many people have encountered the Buddha’s teachings when learning to meditate. Many more people in the world, however, have learned about the Buddha through stories imparting lessons about how to live wisely. Why is there so much emphasis on meditation? What else is there in the teachings to support wise and ethical living?
-
Discovering the Joy of Sensory Awareness: Mindfulness in Nature
Recorded :
February 12, 2023 When we turn our attention to the sensory, natural world around us, mindfulness practice can become easeful and expansive. Nature allures awareness through her beauty, and range of dynamic, enchanting experience. In this session we will practice cultivating attention to our sense experience, and discovering joy, peace and wonder in this very moment. Tune in from any peaceful environment outdoors with an internet connection, or indoors, ideally with a view of the outdoors.
-
Daily life practice – the cultivation of virtue in ordinary action.
Recorded :
December 11, 2016 Shaila discusses the cultivation of virtue. Her talk will considers the relationship between virtue practices, and the more popular practices of compassion, mindfulness, and wisdom.
Discussion