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

Waking down

With Leela Sarti recorded on November 26, 2017.

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

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.

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

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Shaila Catherine

    The power of intention.

    Worldwide Insight talk from Shaila Catherine: “The Power of Intention”. Guided meditation, Dharma talk and Q&A.

    Read More

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Ulla Koenig – Week of 13 October, 2025

    We’re delighted to have Ulla Koenig guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May these gatherings enrich your practice.

    This week’s theme is: Metta in Action

    To be met with metta is to be received with basic respect and a sense of intrinsic worth-simply because we exist. It’s not something we earn or measure; it’s a fundamental recognition of our being. This week, we explore how to extend such warmth toward ourselves. And we’ll look at how metta supports accountability, nurtures integrity, and helps us respond to criticism with clarity and compassion-opening the door to deeper self-understanding and genuine growth.

    Our Dharma Library thrives through collective generosity. Your donation helps sustain this offering for our entire community.

    Read More

  • Shaila Catherine

    Protecting the Mind

    The encounter with sensory experiences can lead to insight and calm, or reactivity and suffering. How do you guard your mind in the midst of a daily barrage of sensory input? How do you protect your mind so that tranquility and wisdom will be well established? The Buddha encouraged restraint of the senses, but this…

    Read More

  • Dave Smith

    Genuine Happiness: An Alternative Perspective

    So much of what we hear and learn about within Dharma practice places an arguably unnecessary emphasis on suffering (dukkha). While the acceptance of suffering (dukkha) is an important and essential aspect of the path, it is by no means the end of the story. In one of the Buddha’s oldest descriptions of what it…

    Read More

  • Dave Smith

    A Practical Approach to Understanding Right Effort

    All schools of Buddhism acknowledge that if we are to “awaken” in this lifetime, our aim is to cultivate and develop the eight-fold path. This path consists of behavioral (sila), meditative (samadhi) and philosophical (panna) dimensions. When skillfully interwoven, this system of training directs us towards a liberation-based lifestyle by embracing the limitations and the…

    Read More