Episodes

This meditation explores the interplay between goodwill, compassion, letting go and welcoming the moment just as it is.

Let go a little, get a little peace. Let go a lot, get a lot of peace. Let go completely, get complete peace. A. Chah Sounds good, but how do we really let go?

A beautiful old story from the Brothers Grimm called the Water of Life offers a powerful metaphor for life and practice.

Clouds In Each Paper, by Thich Nhat Hanh If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine ...

This week’s podcast is a re-visit of the Story of the Buddha from 2021 in which we explore the myth story of the Buddha’s life and how it relates directly to understanding our own personal causes of suffering and the path to our healing.

This meditation is opening to a beautiful place that exists right in the heart of any moment– just as it is, easy, challenging and everything in-between.

What happens when we feel like we are being told that we “should” be compassionate even towards people we find the most challenging– whether someone in our personal life or in the world? If we misunderstand compassion as excusing harmful behavior, of course our “innards” will rebel! When we instead begin to feel into the fierce openheartedness of strong courageous compassion, we start to see how much more effective we become in responding wisely to harmful behavior.

In this meditation we explore what happens right at that moment when we wake up from the mind drifting and the rich potency of this moment for teaching us about refuge, release, relief and letting go. BIRD WINGS Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror up to where you are bravely working. Expecting the worst, you look, and instead, here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see. Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, y...

This is a second sharing on the importance of bringing a light playful attitude into our heart/mindfulness practice. As one researcher points out: “Play lies at the core of creativity and innovation and allows us to be free of the constraints of time and to experience a diminished consciousness of self. It allows us to explore new ways of thinking and behaving so that we are not locked into a rigid way of doing things, are open to variation, see things in a different way, and gain new insights....

This is a practice of releasing into a silence that is our way to a wholeness, healing and freedom that is our home.

In this sharing, we explore a practice suggested by the poet and writer Colette Lafia regarding the importance of play. As she names, play has particularly qualities that we can forget or get pushed aside as we age, qualities that are very important for deepening our relationship with all.

This meditation explores opening and relaxing into a beautiful space that awareness is always offering.

This sharing is based on a great story regarding a thief and his encounter with a Buddhist master.

Mindfulness has this beautiful potential of bringing our body, mind and heart together in harmony with whatever is here right now.

It is so important for us to know our country’s history and celebrate the movements we have made in the direction of healing and wholeness. It is also so important to know where there is still so much more work to do and make a commitment as best as we are able to name the need for this work. Note: one correction– more than one third of the 8 Fold Path involves ethical principles. Wise Speech, Wise Livelihood and Wise Action are the three ethical or Sila factors of the 8 Fold Path.

In this meditation, we explore letting go into a connectivity with the Earth which gives rooting and uplift both.

This sharing examines the useful similarities of learning to train and dog and a human mind both– all about mindfulness and mammal biology.

This meditation explores the 3 beautiful steps offered by Sayadaw U Tejaniya for all of moments of practice, and therefore, life.

This week’s sharing is based on a short story with the teaching, “Thank you, I am grateful for everything.” What are ways of relating to this teaching that are useful for you? What are ways that are not useful for you?

Finding an attunement to a moment of practice– no matter what we are feeling in our internal world– that is useful for our freedom and “thank you” begins to naturally arise.

Paradigm shifts are when we come to understand that what we took as a reality is, in fact, not the deeper truth of things and it startles our systems enough into seeing the ourselves, each other or the the world through a whole new lens. Feeling into paradigm shifts helps shed light on the basic shift we are uncovering with our mindfulness practice.

In this meditation we explore the different feel of being caught in the reactive mind and those moments, no matter how small, when the body, mind and heart are in attunement. This attunement is what we are pointing to as “mindfulness,” and when we are aware of it, it has a natural sense of coming home. Again. Please note: the mild echo is only in this podcast and has been fixed.

This sharing explores teachings from the book, Difficult Conversations. This book examines the ways conversations we care about can so easily get “hijacked,” and ways to help us stay grounded in having the conversation we want to have instead.

The is a meditation on bringing care to our internal “bad student”– i.e. meeting the part of us we want to get rid of, the part we see as disrupting our meditation. This willingness to meet our troublesome, annoying, distracted, angry, worried, tired, or any other version of the “bad student” is ultimately the path of our freedom.