Sunday Sangha: Free Live Dharma Talks & Meditation

Sunday Sangha – 19th July 2026

This session is led by Sean Oakes.

Start Time: 11 am PDT (LA) / 2 pm EDT (NY) / 7 pm BST (London) / 8 pm CEST (Paris). 90-minute live session.

This week’s theme: The First Teaching: Radical Medicine for a Painful World

The July full moon marks Dhamma Day (Āsāḷha Pūjā), the anniversary of the Buddha’s very first teaching, given to five friends in a deer park 2,614 years ago. This one ancient talk is said to contain the entire path. And it still asks something extraordinary of us: a complete reorientation of how we live. We’ll listen for the fierce compassion at the heart of that original message-and explore how to actually take the medicine, right now, in the middle of everything.

“Whatever is subject to origination is all subject to cessation.”
– Venerable Kondañña, upon hearing the first teaching (SN 56.11)

“It’s not a middle way that is a compromise where you can cut out the hard bits and split the difference so you feel good about it.”
– Ajahn Pasanno

This talk will reference Saṃyutta Nikāya 56.11, “Setting in Motion the Wheel of the Dhamma”. Listen and read along to Sean reading the discourse here.

This session is freely-offered, but dana/donations are invited to help us meet our substantial running costs and to support our teachers. To donate, please click here. We appreciate your generosity 🙏

Sean Oakes

Sean Oakes, PhD (he/him, queer, of Spanish/Puerto Rican and Northern European ancestry living on unceded Pomo land in California), teaches Buddhism, Yoga, and somatic practice. He has studied in Theravāda, Zen, and Vajrāyāna Buddhist lineages, including training as a monk in Burma, and was authorized to teach Insight Meditation by Jack Kornfield in 2010. His primary Buddhist teachers include Jack Kornfield, Sylvia Boorstein, Gil Fronsdal, Eugene Cash, Kitissaro, and Ṭhānissara; Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, Anam Thubten, and Chammyay Sayadaw (U Janaka), with whom he ordained as a bhikkhu for a Rains Retreat in Burma in 2002.

He studied Yoga with Alice Joanou, Rachel Shaw, Amanda Moran, and David Moreno, and taught mindfulness-based āsana and prāṇāyāma for 10 years, and performed for many years in music, dance, and performance art, including with Keith Hennessy’s Circo Zero, and trained in Somatic Experiencing (SE) and Organic Intelligence (OI) with Steven Hoskinson, integrating the complex systems approach from OI in a distinctively Buddhist approach to trauma resolution. He received his PhD in Performance Studies from UC Davis in 2016, writing on extraordinary states of consciousness in Buddhist meditation and experimental dance. He teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, East Bay Meditation Center, Insight Timer, and elsewhere, focusing on the integration of philosophy, somatics, and social justice discourse with the Dharma. Click here to learn more about Sean Oakes.