In this talk James introduces Nina Raddy, a member of our IMCB community, who shares from her own experience of community practice and helping build Community Village, a vibrant, peer-led meditation community for people in their 20s and 30s in the Bay Area. She'll explore how generosity, wholesome friendship, and simply showing up for one another can themselves become profound practices. Buddhist teachings place great emphasis on spiritual friendship and sangha — the community of practitioners — as essential supports for the path. Yet in a culture that often emphasizes individualism and disconnection, sangha can seem like a good idea but not something we truly experience to the extent we wish we had. Data from the U.S. Surgeon General emphasizes that lacking social connection carries a mortality risk comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, making community engagement a biological necessity rather than a comfort. Community acts as the vital antidote to the modern public health crisis of isolation, transforming deep-seated loneliness into a foundation for emotional and physical survival. What does it mean to practice community?

Drawing on the Mettā Sutta, this talk from Clear Dharma Sangha explores mettā as a way of life, a profound wish for the safety and happiness of all beings, and a way of seeing. Through the practice of the neutral person, we begin to extend goodwill beyond preference — and to cultivate a refuge that steadies us not to escape, but to turn toward the world with clarity, courage, and care.

A guided meditation of attending to the Sound of Silence within the framework of the Seven Awakening Factors. (This meditation practice begins with a period of guided standing meditation.)

A journey through the possibilities of practice.

Dolls, loss, love and the narrative cure. Kafka consoles a girl with a series of letters about a lost doll. An excursion into four different and indispensable tasks for any contemplative practitioner: (i) Calming & stabilzing (ii) Dis-identification and decentering (iii) Deep Inquiry and thorough contemplative Investigation (iv) The bigger Picture – gaining an universal perspective on the personal