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The greatest gift is the
gift of the teachings
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Dharma Talks
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2025-01-16
Metta Practice and the Larger World (Retreat at Spirit Rock)
42:17
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Donald Rothberg
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In this session, Donald gives about a 25-minute talk, followed by 15 minutes of discussion. How do we move from a week of metta practice into a time of turmoil and uncertainty in the U.S. and in the world? A number of guidelines and suggestions are given, including keeping the vision of practicing in all parts of one’s life, and keeping close the visions of awakening and of what Dr. King called the “beloved community.” In this time, staying connected with community is also crucial, as are, among many skillful intentions, practicing skillfully with difficult emotions, grounding in the body, cultivating cycles of engagement and withdrawal, and being careful about the amount of information one takes in. The talk ends by pointing to Joanna Macy’s model of three areas of transformation, and the invitation to respond to the call that each of us may hear. Discussion follows.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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Mettā Retreat: Teachings and Practices to Cultivate a Wise, Awakened, and Responsive Heart
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2025-01-15
Metta Practice and the Life and Work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Retreat at Spirit Rock)
55:59
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Donald Rothberg
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On the birthday of Dr. King, we explore some of the remarkable and powerful parallels between Metta practice and Buddhist teachings, on the one hand, and the life, teachings, and work of Dr. King, on the other. We explore in particular three areas: (1) the connection between Metta and the Christian tradition of acting from love that is central for King; (2) the wisdom perspective of seeing greed, hatred, and delusion, and developing understanding and manifesting non-reactivity through ethical grounding and nonviolence; and (3) the other qualities of the awakened heart--the Brahmavihara for the Buddha, and Dr. King’s way of manifesting qualities in addition to love, such as compassion, empathy, joy, and equanimity.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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Mettā Retreat: Teachings and Practices to Cultivate a Wise, Awakened, and Responsive Heart
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2025-01-13
Understanding Impermanence - Week 1 of 6 - Meditation
23:03
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Mark Nunberg
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UNDERSTANDING IMPERMANENCE with Mark Nunberg
This six-week course will explore the Buddha’s teachings on impermanence, the first of the three characteristics that are said to mark all of existence. Sensing deeply the changing and insubstantial nature of all conditioned experience liberates the heart from its entrenched habits of attachment. Participants will be expected to use the teachings as a focus of their daily practice. This ongoing program is designed to deepen our understanding through the study and application of the teachings of the Buddha.
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Common Ground Meditation Center
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Buddhist Studies: Understanding Impermanence
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2025-01-13
Understanding Impermanence - Week 1 of 6 - Talk
54:43
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Mark Nunberg
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UNDERSTANDING IMPERMANENCE with Mark Nunberg
This six-week course will explore the Buddha’s teachings on impermanence, the first of the three characteristics that are said to mark all of existence. Sensing deeply the changing and insubstantial nature of all conditioned experience liberates the heart from its entrenched habits of attachment. Participants will be expected to use the teachings as a focus of their daily practice. This ongoing program is designed to deepen our understanding through the study and application of the teachings of the Buddha.
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Common Ground Meditation Center
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Buddhist Studies: Understanding Impermanence
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2025-01-12
Return to and Strengthen the Heart
40:40
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Ajahn Sucitto
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Aim to clarify, and strengthen the heart. This is through gathering energy in the heart – that is ‘samadhi’ (concentration). Letting go in the flood of life requires this strength and the relinquishment that support, and are supported by, samadhi. In the presence of a balanced and strengthened citta, we see and respond to the irritations of life in a full-hearted way; The aggregates are cooled. (refers to M64 and S47.42)
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Cittaviveka
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2025-01-11
Making Our Home in Dana
29:10
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Devon Hase
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This talk explores dāna (generosity) as both a foundational practice and natural expression of awakening. Devon describes how generosity creates conditions for happiness while requiring wisdom about our boundaries and capacities. Using personal examples about balancing family obligations with self-care, she illustrates how true generosity requires knowing ourselves well. The talk emphasizes that generosity is already present in awareness itself—in our natural capacity to receive and release each moment. It concludes that belonging and interconnection are our true nature, and that letting go paradoxically requires feeling held in the refuge of community.
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Refuge of Belonging
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2025-01-11
Generosity Is the Answer
29:10
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Devon Hase
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A talk focused on Dana Parami and its role in recognizing Nibbana. The discussion highlighted the importance of removing obscurations to reveal awareness, wisdom, and love. Devon explained how Paramis helped clear the way and emphasized the interdependence of giving and receiving. Practical aspects of generosity were addressed, including maintaining healthy boundaries and understanding motivations. Personal stories and reflections were shared to illustrate different types of giving and the long-term benefits of a generous mindset. Devon encouraged participants to practice generosity in daily life and highlighted the profound impact of living with an open heart.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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Spirit Rock - Rainbow Sangha
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2025-01-11
Entering the undifferentiated
50:09
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Ajahn Sucitto
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Progressive cultivation of mindfulness to maintain presence through the range of states, so that one allows then to pass. Attention is less snagged on different qualities. It opens to simple awareness. Familiar reactions, and with them, identification,subside. Undifferentiated awareness remains. (refers to S.47:42)
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Cittaviveka
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2025-01-10
Wisdom – which mountain and how to climb
48:45
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Ajahn Sucitto
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Practice is about fostering growth based on wisdom, effort and view. Wisdom is conditioned by a faith that leads on to motivation/desire, energy, heart and discriminative attention (iddhipada). Effort should be wisely moderated - to sustain, restrain, persevere, uplift, calm. Application of citta is fundamental to the Path; but make it relevant to uplifting the heart. Details on application to mindfulness of breathing.
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Cittaviveka
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2025-01-09
The Welcome Vihara
46:25
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Ajahn Sucitto
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Basis of healthy human life is goodwill. Our practice is to welcome, to allow and encompass differences. Speech and action based on Dhamma values establishes skilful common ground. We contemplate the effects of deluded reactions and release them - and the citta dwells in a beautiful place and grows beyond self towards measurelessness.
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Cittaviveka
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2025-01-09
We Are What We Think
47:51
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James Baraz
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The subject of this talk is the opening verse of the Dhammapada, the famous collection of the Buddha’s teachings. The verse starts out with these words: “We are what we think. With our thoughts we make the world.” This teaching can be truly transformative in one’s meditation practice as well as in one’s life.
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Insight Meditation Community of Berkeley
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2025-01-08
The Nature of Awakening and the Path to Awakening
58:53
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Donald Rothberg
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As we begin a new year, it's helpful to remember the deep motivation of our practice--to awaken--and to ask how our intention to awaken manifests in our practice. In this talk, we explore the Buddha's metaphor of "awakening" (from sleep, from dreams) as a metaphor for spiritual practices, and how he also speaks of realizing Nirvana. We unpack how the Buddha understood Nirvana and awakening--both negatively, as the end of ignorance, and dukkha and reactivity--and more positively as going fully beyond the ordinary constructions of experience. We also look at how the Buddha understood the practical path of training to realize awakening and Nirvana, and how this was explicated through different teachings and practices. At the end, we briefly bring up the question of what a contemporary path of awakening looks like. The talk is followed by discussion.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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Monday and Wednesday Talks
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2025-01-08
Faith, view and abandonment
48:32
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Ajahn Sucitto
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Messages arise from the citta/heart: world-weariness and a sense of resolve. One begins to withdraw from the input of sense-consciousness and attune to what the citta values: ethics, goodwill and skilful states. So there is a recognition of citta/heart, an intelligence that can reflect upon and moderate consciousness, and moves towards devotion and self-abandonment (refers to A.10:58).
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Cittaviveka
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2025-01-05
Refuge
28:45
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Ayyā Nimmalā
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True refuge is a call to stop, even for a moment, to see and know the breath that brings the world into and out of consciousness. We witness the liberating silence of that present moment awareness. In the still space between thoughts from which all that appears in the mind arises and disappears without end, we let go. Trust this. See the instability and insecurity of all else. Be an island, be a refuge unto yourself in the pure awareness of truth beyond concepts – the truth in this moment of freedom. Disentangled from the world, we can let go. Our refuge is the awakened heart.
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Sati Saraniya Hermitage
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2025-01-04
Metaphors of realisation: Sudden and Gradual
1:10:58
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Akincano Marc Weber
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How do we make ourselves growth and realisation? Tracing the historical, psychological and
Two sources of valid forms of knowlege:
– Paccakkha "before the eye," i.e. 'perceptible to the senses'
'direct experience'.
– Anvaya – 'inference'
History of Sudden & Gradual. Aside of the the historical background, these terms have taken on a metaphorical meaning: the talk looks at how these metaphors chart the path of practice, their respective analogies and their images, their framing of the probleme and their respective values and drawbacks. – May these metaphors ultimately have their bases in the differeing mind functions of samādhi (gradual) and sati (sudden)? The speaker, despite little canonical evidence, thinks so.
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Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center
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Embodying the Heart of Wisdom: New Year’s Retreat
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2025-01-04
From A Single Flame To Vast Light
33:37
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Ayya Medhanandi
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Guided by the Dhamma, our life path is courageous. See how the world burns from cruel and chaotic forces. So we cultivate a heart of compassionate awareness and peace, knowing that freedom from suffering is within reach. Our spiritual footprints emulate those of the Buddha himself. We persevere and endure, powered by the noble fire of the Dhamma to illuminate our way and to bless us and all generations to come. Small as the flame appears, its light is as vast as this universe.
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Portland Friends of the Dhamma
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