Short Reflection & Guided Meditation including a poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer | Earthworm Practice for the Anthropocene III | Online Wednesday-Mornings

This guided meditation goes along with the talk entitled Embodiment in a Digital Age: A Return to the Living World

In our fast-paced, confusing, unjust world, it's easy - perhaps even natural - to feel overwhelmed, disconnected, or caught in cycles of reactivity. Fortunately, the Buddha's Middle Path offers us another way (namely Wise View, Wise Intention, Wise Speech, Wise Action, Wise Livelihood, Wise Effort, Wise Mindfulness & Wise Concentration). This Dharma talk will explore and illuminate how the eight trainings of the Middle Path can help us establish a more balanced and embodied approach to life's many challenges. We could sum it up as resilience. Drawing from our traditional practices and of sitting and walking meditation, we'll delve into a re-embodying approach that fosters buoyancy, clarity, and compassion, even in the most difficult situations. The teachings will be suitable for both beginners and seasoned practitioners seeking to enrich their practice with embodied mindfulness. The evening's session will help practitioners ground their meditation in the felt sense of the body, making the profound teachings of the Dharma more accessible and alive in everyday life, with all its joys, sorrows and surprises.

How true can we be so we don’t have to lie? Not just in what we say or think but also in how we live this precious life both in our doings on the outside, and also what goes on inside the mind – where no one can see! But we see. We know the state of the heart. When we turn away from self- deception to the inner shining, we are set free from our deepest pain – with pure love. So live caring for yourself as for others – spiritually in tact and whole, with measureless kindness and compassion. Sitting in the school of Truth, more than pilgrims, we are stars crossing space. We shine, even in the dark.

Our practice is a unique opportunity to develop our deepest potential for happiness as human beings. We use the skills of interior investigation with patience and courage to study the intimate workings of the mind. Well-guided by the Buddha’s teachings, we gradually learn intuitively how to direct ourselves on this path of wholesomeness and devotion. By trusting our spiritual practice, we are strengthened, growing inwardly as we directly experience freedom from fear and the heart's true compassion.

We are caught up in the world – as if we're in jail. But we are also on the threshold of silence wherein lies the key to pure, infinite, wordless presence. Isn't that love – timeless, universal, here and now? Sustain that purity of heart and abide in pure presence, aware of awareness itself. There is no 'one' there, no solid being, and no experience is refused. Why is that? Because we cease to live in fear. The Buddha guides us to witness this process – not as a person identified with self or ego but just letting the world go. For we are not what we know, and that consciousness is the Deathless.