Our most valued renewable resource is the heart, the seat of awareness and our true refuge in what is worthy of refuge – the ancient virtue of the noble ones. Breath by breath, we embody pure presence, wisely seeing how suffering arises and understanding the Noble Truth of how it ends. With courage enough to face our fear, we cut the currents of negativity and we stop feeding them. This is our path to the ending of pain – the heart’s total release.

How training the mind in following precepts, such as the rules regarding the use of four monastic requisites - food, robes, shelter, and medicines, can win us greater patience, faith, gratitude, calm, courage, and mindfulness. Such ways of renunciation test our commitment to the path and teach us how to forgive and let go even our fears so that we harvest the riches of joy, compassion and inner peace.

These talks investigate how fear, nature's protector, proliferates and becomes a trance of fear and the cause of deep suffering. We look at the "body of fear"- the thoughts, physicality, emotions and behaviors that express and fuel the trance of fear. Through stories and guided reflections we explore the ways that Buddhist meditation can free us from the grip of unhealthy fear.

Opening talk for a retreat that explores our reactive mind, recognising and liberating our habitual compulsion, negativity and fear, pointing towards the freedom of being that is our True Nature.

Opening talk for a retreat that explores our reactive mind, recognising and liberating our habitual compulsion, negativity and fear, pointing towards the freedom of being that is our True Nature.

These talks investigate how fear, nature's protector, proliferates and becomes a trance of fear and the cause of deep suffering. We look at the "body of fear"- the thoughts, physicality, emotions and behaviors that express and fuel the trance of fear. Through stories and guided reflections we explore the ways that Buddhist meditation can free us from the grip of unhealthy fear.

Guest Dharma Talk

What is action when it is not related to conditioning and fear? This talk explores action from stillness.

The brahmaviharas are four mental states that the Buddha encouraged for the practice of meditation. They are loving -friendliness (metta), compassion, sympathetic joy (rejoicing in the happiness of others), and equanimity. Through these practices we develop a loving heart, concentration, self-acceptance, fearlessness and happiness. These practices also establish our fundamental connectedness to all life.

The fruit of practice is releasing our identification with core beliefs and fear-based emotions, and realizing and inhabiting our Natural awareness. This is described as the N in RAIN - an acronym that can guide us in awakening loving presence.

Application of Shamatha Vipassana practice in working with fear.

Fear often drives our lives in unhealthy ways. This talk explores having a conscious and wise relationship to it.

The Buddha taught that our fear is great, but greater yet is the truth of our connectedness. These two talks examine the often unconscious habits that generate the pain of separation, and the practices that allow us to realize and live from an awake heart.

Emotions are expressed through a mood, body sensation, and thoughts. Mindfulness of these aspects is illustrated in the talk for desire, anger, sadness, and fear.

Doubt can be an obstacle to meditation or a form of healthy inquiry. It is helpful to ask questions, to ponder, and be willing to doubt our beliefs and opinions. Ask yourself: are my views true? We hold many unexamined beliefs—beliefs about self, about how things should be, about what other people should do. The Kalama Sutta encourages us to question what we think, and to not adopt beliefs based on hearsay or mere tradition. We can use our minds to critically inquire into how things actually are. Doubt as an obstacle, on the other hand, is a painful state that leads to confusion, fear, indecision, and uncertainty. It manifests as obsessive thinking, planning, and anxiety. The Discourse to Malunkyaputta (Middle Length Discourses, M. 63) proposes that if we indulge in speculative thinking we might miss the opportunity to free ourselves from suffering. Specific suggestions are offered for working skillfully with the hindrance of doubt.

Fear is a deep issue and a challenging one. Dealing with fear opens the door to new territory and gives us the courage to jump over the edge.

This talk explores in detail the tools and approaches we can develop to work skillfully with fear in our lives, both those fears that are obvious and those that are more hidden. There is a genuine possibility of liberation from the power that fear seems to have to constrict us

What activates the desires and fears we have when we come into contact with another? Meditation is about seeing things as they actually are, the operation of the heartmind intra and interpersonally. The mind will then incline towards what is wise. The heart is moved by contact with another. However there is pressure/tendencies of the mind to move into agitation and confusion on contact with others. What activates the fears and desires of interpersonal interaction? Hunger (tanha) pressurises thoughts and feelings so that the mind doesn't settle. It is like fuel or an electric current for the system (personality) that is in place. All thoughts/actions/speech are conditioned by past habits and occurrences (sankhara conditions namarupa). Hunger/craving fuels/energises the system to generate more constructs along the same lines as previous ones. (These can be wise or unwise habits) There are three hungers: 1) Hunger for sense desires which includes social desires as well e.g. avoidance of loneliness which is like a death of the self. it might be seeking pleasure from others, seeking approval from parents, or in a Buddhist rebirth sense of driving from life to life. 2) Hunger to be seen, to become. 3) Hunger not to be seen e.g. interacting whilst performing a role, wearing a mask so the 'real you' is hidden, limiting contact with people, or having contact defined procedurally so it is blinkered - again a form of 'hiding'.

Appreciating the healing and liberating power of fear and mind. Learning to trust and use awareness.

When you move towards what is fearful step by step with courage, it is possible to overcome the darkest moments breath by breath.  Draw together all the threads of your life, and let each one go strand by strand. A guided meditation on death at a 10 day retreat, Galilee Centre, Arnprior, Ontario Canada.

This talk explores how entering the Third Noble Truth opens the mind beyond its habitual addiction to interpret life from a sense of being a personality, needing to 'sort things out'. Opening the mind implies an ability to tolerate the reality of uncertainty. This talk also explores compassion and loving kindness as fearlessness and includes a simple guided meditation on well-being.

Including fear in the field of Dharma practice.

Shrouded in the cloud of ignorance, we believe that suffering will never happen to us. But when we emerge from that fog into a radical simplicity of heart, suffering becomes our teacher. Our eyes are opened thanks to Right View and direct experience of the Four Noble Truths. At last we transcend the tyranny of fear.

Can we fearlessly accept all that life gives with a wise and compassionate heart? We see how the sun shines unilaterally on all beings giving life and nourishment. But we must use sharp wisdom to discern what is harmful and abandon that; and to know what is wholesome and cultivate that. Even as a mother, may we emulate the Buddha's compassion that flows without bias in all directions across millenia.

The mind is always creating thought worlds that make us suffer. To get beyond this suffering, you have to confront the fears that force the mind to keep creating these worlds.

What supports lovingkindness is the sincere caring we give in each moment as we say a metta phrase. What obstructs metta are its near and far enemies; affection with attachment and aversion such as sadness, fear, anger, or judgement.

Contact brings impressions into the heart, which gets retrained at an involuntary level and affect our immediate response to life in terms of fear, mistrust, desire. There are ways of clearing this—the result is joy.

“Being human is a guest house” wrote Rumi. Every day we greet new arrivals – joys, sorrows, hostilities and more; and moments of awareness too. We bow to the present moment and greet them all, be they thorns or unruly monsters like malice, shame, fear, anger or greed. Can we see them all just as they are, painful or pleasant – impermanent, not ours, not who we are? Can we let them come and go, and be grateful? Treat whatever passes through the heart as empty. After all, these are karmic messengers from beyond bearing unique spiritual gifts. For in their presence, we strengthen our practice. Wisely attentive, reflective, and aware, we are on the magnificent path of waking up.

The larger plane of becoming is potent with tendencies that give rise to the person. This person becomes formed from our worries, fears, compulsions – it’s a restricted self. We practice widening into that larger citta realm and cultivating enlightenment factors to form around instead. This is how we take responsibility for what we put out into the world, and to change our kamma.

Boundaries create a self-definition between what I am and what I fear becoming. Understanding how the fear and the self-definition arise together allows their dissolution.

Understanding the trance of fear and the practices that free our heart.

Although freedom is found in the moment, there is a continual process of purifying the heart and mind. This process is discussed including facing our fears, deepening our commitment, learning to love ourselves while seeing through our sense of self, culminating in practice being our gift to the world.

This talk explores fear as a form of craving and also several particular fears, such as death, judgement, and emptiness. It concludes with practical instructions on working with fear in meditation, which can lead to a fearlessness with all difficult states.

MD225

In dealing with the demons of the mind that is with all the emotions and mental states causing fear, sorrow, attachment or any other sort of mental anquish we are able to courageously face them with bare awareness. When this awareness or mindfulness is strong without reacting to the experience, even the worst enemies are dissolved like the morning mist in the rising sun.

Dharma practice has two functions: First it makes us healthy, then it makes us free. The talk explores both these phases, as well as their accompanying attitudes, and explores the process of healing in relation to fear.

When we engage with metta practice we receive either metta (purity) or the inner obstacles to metta, which provide the material for the purification of heart. This talk describes how to relate with self-judgement and fear through metta, as well as the supportive factor of concentration, another aspect of innate purity.

The way out of pain is not in sense pleasure. But suffering can be a ticket to Nibbana – maybe not the one we asked for, but it's in our hands. So we try. Taste the moment just as it is. Choose love when there is every reason to hate. Trust when there is every reason to despair. Be patient when anger is burning within. Faced with terror or far from peace, let go. Being still in the very midst of fear, we can know non-fear. All is fleeting, not what we are, and nothing to hold onto. There, in the silent flow of the breath, the heart will soften in a tender wave of unconditional love.

In a psychic feat for his sister, Sundari Nanda, the Buddha creates a vision of a beautiful lady who transforms into an old woman. Through this direct experience of impermanence, her mind is liberated. Likewise, those who rightly love wisdom and contemplate death without fear see the emptiness and impermanence of all conditioned things. Realizing the futility of all clinging and the inevitability of death, our wisdom and faith in the Dhamma ripen and reveal the doors to the Deathless. This is the path of awakening.

Valuing healthy connection and detachment while facing our inloveability fear of nothingness