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

Search Sangha Live

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

  • Pamela Weiss

    Living by Vow

    Recorded : July 23, 2023

    To live by vow is a radical reorientation – from reactivity to response-ability, and from fear to love. This session will examine what it means to walk the spiritual path, and consider the importance of inspiration, aspiration and aligned, appropriate action. Together we will explore the tenderness and power of meeting the world from what…

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Zohar Lavie – Week of September 5, 2022

    This week’s topic is “Awakening into Experience Here and Now”. “You shouldn’t chase after the past
    or place expectations on the future.
    What is past
    is left behind.
    The future
    is as yet unreached.
    Whatever quality is present
    you clearly see right there,
    right there.
    Not taken in,
    unshaken,
    that’s how you develop the heart.” (MN 131)

    The essence of the Buddha’s teachings lies in these words. Unshakability and freedom are at the heart of awakening, they are what we cultivate in our practice. This week we will practice turning to our experience in ways that wake us up, right here and now.

    Read More

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of July 18, 2022

    This week’s topic is Perfectly Imperfect. “True perfection seems imperfect, yet is perfectly itself.” – Lao Tzu. Expecting life to be perfect is stressful: a beautiful goal like “getting it right” prevents us from developing when it morphs into “never getting anything wrong.” The non-harming noble-truths path of the Dharma may arouse perfectionism, but if carefully followed, can set us free from such entrapment.

    Read More

  • Deborah Eden Tull - Senior Dharma Teacher

    Luminous Darkness: A Path for Seeing Clearly from the Heart

    Recorded : October 2, 2022

    One of the gifts of global uncertainty is that it requires us to recognize and release unconscious biases that have been passed down for generations. These include the perception that splits into opposites and values light over dark, speed over slowing down, productivity over attunement, and conclusion over not knowing. Awakening requires that we soften…

    Read More

  • Tuere Sala

    The Supramundane Nature of Emptiness

    Recorded : September 15, 2024

    Emptiness can be a loaded word for lay practitioners. It can bring up a sense of isolation and annihilation. The dharma of emptiness, however, is a fundamental part of practice. Even in the most mundane tasks of our ordinary lives, we can access emptiness and feel the freedom that comes with it. It’s not about…

    Read More