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The greatest gift is the gift of the teachings
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Dharma Talks
2024-02-10
What Skilful Means
1:19:51
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Nathan Glyde
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Exploring what (being) skilful means, and what (are) skilful means. The Dharma is not simple, and it is not overly complex. We need to find a middle way that is sufficiently dynamic and appropriate. This is from an Online Dharma Hall session with a meditation, a reflection, and responses to questions. The questions are not recorded for privacy reasons, the responses are shaped to allow for comprehension despite this.
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Gaia House
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Online Dharma Hall - February 2024
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2024-02-10
In the Name of Wisdom
14:12
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Ayya Medhanandi
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What does it mean to be noble? As a daughter of the Buddha, I learn that no name can confer authority or self-respect, nor does opinion, tradition or entitlement bestow them, for as the Buddha wisely teaches, “One does not become a noble one by birth. It is by one's deeds that one attains to nobility.” Just so, the riches of our human journey are revealed in the fire of inner purification. Therein we find our true name. It is nothing less than the pure presence behind every name – the emptiness in which all personal identity dissolves. And where only unconditional love abides.
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Sati Saraniya Hermitage
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2024-02-07
Meditation: Relaxed and Alert
19:37
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Tara Brach
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This meditation begins with a period of relaxing and collecting our attention with intentional long, deep breathing. We then deepen embodied presence, and widen to the awareness that includes sounds, sensations, feelings, breath, and all experience. When the mind drifts from this open, awake awareness, we gently return, re-relaxing and resting in an easeful, alert presence. Recorded at Tara’s Wednesday night class, the meditation ends with a sense of melting into community – relaxed and alert.
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Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
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2024-02-07
What is the Path to Peace? A conversation with Tara Brach and Assaf Katz
61:44
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Tara Brach
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Assaf Katz is an activist and Buddhist teacher in Israel who opposes the Israeli governments’ devastating military action and long occupation in Palestine, and is dedicated to finding a path to peace. This conversation was part of an event for the Tovana mediation community in Israel. We talk about the inner process behind my circulation of a short piece responding to the violence in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel; how we can work with strong reactive emotions and trauma; what helps us to speak and act in a way that is truly serves the greater good, and what can give us hope for eventual peace. This offering includes the recording of a question/response period and a sharing of prayers.
Read the article “What is Love Asking From Us?”
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Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
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2024-02-01
Sudden Awakening, Gradual Cultivation:
The Process of Purification
52:56
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James Baraz
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Sometimes it feels as if our practice is taking one step forward and two steps back. Or two steps forward and two steps back. In this talk I want to explore the process of awakening in the context of understanding the trajectory of practice.
Even though it might not seem as if much is happening or that you're truly growing, it's happening anyway. However, there are some things to know about how the process works that can help you develop patience, confidence and inspiration.
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Insight Meditation Community of Berkeley
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2024-01-31
Letting Go of Controlling: The Path of Freedom – Part 1
56:09
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Tara Brach
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While it’s natural to try to control our life experience, our chronic controlling cuts us off from presence and obscures the loving awareness that is our essence. This series of talks explores how we can let go in four key domains of controlling: clinging to thoughts, resisting feelings, holding tight to beliefs and armoring our heart.
We look at how egoic controlling manifests individually and as a society; the process of awakening from exclusive identification with a separate ego/self; what it means to die into a larger reality and the similarities of psychedelics and meditation in the process of letting go.
The gift of releasing the grip of controlling is true freedom; inhabiting the intrinsic beauty of our beings, and having our lives be an expression of creativity, wisdom and love.
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Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
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2024-01-31
Integrating Metta Practice with Wisdom, Awareness, and Insight Practice 2
64:31
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Donald Rothberg
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We continue to explore how we might practice metta (and other heart practices) in a way integrated with mindfulness, wisdom, and insight, building on last week's session. We begin looking at some of the ways historically and culturally that the "mind" and "reason" have been separated from emotion, dating from Plato and the Greeks, and continued in the modern world with the understanding of reason and science as separate from emotion (and the body). This has been a major part of our social and cultural conditioning, evident in how mainstream education occurs, and also linked with gender conditioning. We also examine how, dating from Buddhaghosa's text, the Visuddhimagga (The Path of Purification), from the 5th century, metta and compassion has been labeled as practices leading to concentration, and not as linked directly with wisdom and awakening. This has been the basis for the 20th century Burmese approaches to metta and mindfulness, which have been the main influences in the West.
However, when we look to the Buddha's actual teachings, as well as later Mahayana and Vajrayana teachings, we find much more of a connection between metta, compassion, and wisdom. We can see this in a number of texts which we explore, including ones in which the heart practices are seen as leading directly to wisdom, and development in awakening.
In the last part of the talk, we explore ways that we can, in our formal and informal practices, integrate metta and wisdom. 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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2024-01-24
Changing Unhealthy Habits of Eating – A Conversation between Tara and Judson Brewer
1:23:25
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Tara Brach
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Countless people live with shame and distress about their eating. Dr. Judson Brewer, scientist, professor and author of “The Hunger Habit” and many other groundbreaking books, is a thought leader in the field of habit change. He’s also a decades long practitioner of mindfulness, and a dear colleague and friend. In this conversation we explore how combining mindfulness practice with a basic understanding of habit change science can free us from unhealthy eating habits. We also look at the larger societal forces that drive overconsumption, as well as the shame that eating behaviors can evoke.
Pick up your copy of The Hunger Habit at: https://drjud.com/the-hunger-habit/
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Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
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2024-01-24
Integrating Metta Practice with Wisdom, Awareness, and Insight Practice 1
63:04
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Donald Rothberg
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We often hear that the heart of the teachings and practice is to connect wisdom and compassion, clear seeing and the kind heart, developing what Jack Kornfield calls the "wise heart." Yet such a connection or integration can be challenging in several ways. First of all, we have major conditioning in modern Western culture to separate the "mind" and the "heart" (or emotions), as well as the body. Also we find tendencies in the Theravada tradition to see Metta practice as separate from Insight practice, as in the way that Buddhaghosa in the influential text, the Visuddhimagga, lists Metta practice as a form of Concentration practice, and in some of the ways that Metta is taught as a complement to insight practice in the West. In this talk, we begin to explore what it might look like to integrate more fully Metta and wisdom, mindfulness, and insight, both in formal practice and daily life. 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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