Rather than waking up it seems that most of us need to wake down. How can our insights and the awakening process move from being primarily experiential to becoming functional, relational, and lived? In this session Leela explores spiritual practice as a fundamentally earthly practice. How do we awake a presence that does not contract in contact with experience? It is an invitation to explore what it means to awaken a belly presence that makes us truly embodied and that potentially embraces and integrates our instinctual nature: our social, sexual and survival drive.
Discover more from the Dharma Library
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What Can I Do to Help?! I’m At My Limit!
Recorded :
May 15, 2022 Sometimes as much as we want to help, we feel stuck. When we see children suffering and grandmothers crying in Ukraine, our hearts break, but the enormity of suffering feels like more than we can bear. How can we meet this wall, especially when our own personal resources are low? In this talk, I’ll teach…
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Daily Meditation Recordings, with Milla Gregor – Week of June 20, 2022
This week’s topic is Skills for Inner and Outer Transformation. Dharma practice gives us great tools for inner and interpersonal change. It’s empowering to explore how these can also be useful for social and environmental transformation. We will tour such qualities, including equanimity (upekkha), non-self (anatta), and sukha (yes, pleasure!). Together, we will draw on both traditional and more contemporary voices to show how your skills as a practitioner could be vital to the work of changing the world.
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Vesak 2568: The Radical Message of Siddhattha Gotama
Recorded :
May 18, 2025 On the Theravāda holiday of Vesak, 2568 years after the Buddha’s death, we honor the ancient ascetic named Siddhattha Gotama, whose insights into the nature of suffering and freedom have inspired fierce disciplines, soaring poetry, subtle psychological and philosophical investigations, and social movements for nonviolence, and social justice. We’ll meditate, learn traditional verses celebrating the…
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Nourishing Compassion
Recorded :
January 9, 2022 His Holiness the Dalai Lama has shared that compassion is not a luxury but a necessity for human beings to survive. There is no more important time to understand and strengthen compassion than right now.
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What does Liberation Mean?
Recorded :
June 22, 2025 Buddha-Dharma teachings offer unparalleled insight into Truth, both ultimate and relative. Yet many practitioners fall into the belief that regular meditation alone will lead to breakthrough experiences and liberation-reinforced by the image of Buddha sitting under the Bodhi Tree.True liberation requires more than mindfulness practice. It transforms our entire conditioning: our ethics, how we view…
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Trust and Faith (Saddha) – The World is Not Against Us
Recorded :
March 7, 2021 How can we develop trust, steadiness and inner freedom, qualities which contribute to our well-being and resilience, and help us to help others? Trust (saddha in Pali) is the first of the Five Spiritual Powers, which are Trust, Energy, Mindfulness, Calm, and Wisdom. Trust is the primary means to dissolve and transform our anxieties, fears,…
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Daily Meditation Recordings, with Zohar Lavie – Week of January 22, 2024
This week’s topic is “Wholehearted Presence”. Meeting experience as it unfolds with presence and interest, we uncover the wellbeing and freedom available to us on the Dharma path. Through this week’s exploration we will open to what supports a wholehearted approach to practice, and understand what is nourished and cultivated when we relate to experience in this way.
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The Kindness of Softness and Space
Recorded :
December 1, 2024 Softness and spaciousness can be cultivated and called upon when needed.The sensations of softness are reflective of ease and equanimity – the feeling of spaciousness, reflective of non-clinging. Both create a natural letting go, flow and arising of love, kindness and tenderness.Embodiment offers a broad range of skillful means. We’ll invite these qualities and directly…
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