This talk was given on the Summer solstice, and the teachings were held outside under the large Plane tree in the Gaia House gardens. Martin explores 3 facets of awareness practice, seeing how they can be applied in any moment, both within the formality of meditation and moment by moment in our wider lives. The 3 are Embodied Presence, Exploration and Inquiry, and Openness to the Nature of experience.
We rely on a sense of certainty and familiarity with how things are, yet when we look closely our experience is uncertain and always presenting anew. Martin looks at the big reference points for our experience; Life, Death, Self and World, pointing to a liberating way of understanding and relating to them that is free of the narrowness of certainty.
Martin explores the twin aspects of Wisdom and Love, as they are expressed in relating to our experience. He looks at the compulsions that easily takes up space in our consciousness, and shows how we can soften around them, and at the tendency to be intolerant, both of ourselves and others, and how we can be forgiving and gracious with our own humanness.
Martin explores the twin aspects of Wisdom and Love, as they are expressed in relating to our experience. He looks at the compulsions that easily takes up space in our consciousness, and shows how we can soften around them, and at the tendency to be intolerant, both of ourselves and others, and how we can be forgiving and gracious with our own humanness.
Martin looks at the constructs of human experience (Nama-Pupa or the aggregates) and explores the transformative insights available to us in looking closely at our moment to moment sense of ourselves and the world around us.
In this introductory talk to the retreat, Martin invites us to practice by doing nothing, not in terms of the retreat format, but in the midst of all activity. He explores how we can speak, move and direct our attention and intention, from a place of profound rest, allowing and inviting everything to happen naturally.
Dana is the practice of generosity as a foundation for happiness or the art of living freely and openly. This talk explores how we can transform the heart in generously meeting ourselves, others and the world around us. We see how qualities of Dana - Generosity, offering, supporting, nourishing, sustaining - are qualities with which to meet and respond skilfully to both outer' situations and inner experience.
Martin asks us first to consider what we really mean by my life, and points beneath the roles, beliefs and activities by which we usually define our lives, to the basic elements of our experience - sensory input, feelings, perceptions, concepts and consciousness. The talk opens up these elements, seeing how our attention to them can teach us, and exploring how we can track, explore and understand our experience as it presents itself, allowing us to respond more fully and freely to the mysterious unfolding display of what we call my life.
Martin looks at qualities of mind that open up our Freedom of Being.He explores how Clarity dissolves our wrong views, how Skilfulness transforms our habits of mind, and how Love can hold all types of experience gently and wisely. The talk keeps references our common experiences, offering practical ways to integrate the teachings.
Our practice offers the opportunity to move beyond a self-centred relationship to life, yet much of our practice is centered on the self! This talk explores dharma practices and skilful means by which to counter our self-centredness and points us towards the ultimate transparency of our sense of self.
In this follow-up, Martin continues to look at the purificatory nature of dharma practice, opening up a space to meet and transform the impact of past habit energy. The teaching deconstructs the notion of karma, and maps the purification of mind-states.
This teaching examines our problematic associations with ideas of Purity, and explores ways that the practice of sitting meditation can be purificatory - both in terms of developing wholesome qualities, and in healing and releasing stored tension patterns.
Martin points out the 3 different kinds of stimulation (vedana) and explores skilful ways of exploring and responding to pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral experience. Emphasis is given to somatic practice, recognizing the physical contractions that form around the 3 types.
Grounding meditation in bodily experience. Activating qualities of awareness through the posture: Grounded - steady, upright - bright, open - receptive, relaxed - gentle.
Meditation practice is a way of directly and intimately exploring life in the laboratory of our own hearts and minds. In cultivating and deepening our practice, we learn about our inner compulsions and contractions, learning to soften and release them.
Simultaneously though, meditation also reveals to us the nature of reality, the way life is, how experience forms and impacts on consciousness. This evening and day with Martin Aylward will focus on some of the more difficult aspects of Buddhist teaching, offering ways to make these profound subjects accessible and even obvious.
Martin will lead us experientially into teachings on ‘emptiness’, ’suchness’ and the fluid, ephemeral nature of experience, pointing us towards an immediate and intimate understanding of these deep and important themes. We will learn together how to approach the deep nature of experience, and how the contemplation of these themes transforms us, bringing together the personal and impersonal aspects of Buddhist practice.
Meditation practice is a way of directly and intimately exploring life in the laboratory of our own hearts and minds. In cultivating and deepening our practice, we learn about our inner compulsions and contractions, learning to soften and release them.
Simultaneously though, meditation also reveals to us the nature of reality, the way life is, how experience forms and impacts on consciousness. This evening and day with Martin Aylward will focus on some of the more difficult aspects of Buddhist teaching, offering ways to make these profound subjects accessible and even obvious.
Martin will lead us experientially into teachings on ‘emptiness’, ’suchness’ and the fluid, ephemeral nature of experience, pointing us towards an immediate and intimate understanding of these deep and important themes. We will learn together how to approach the deep nature of experience, and how the contemplation of these themes transforms us, bringing together the personal and impersonal aspects of Buddhist practice.
Meditation practice is a way of directly and intimately exploring life in the laboratory of our own hearts and minds. In cultivating and deepening our practice, we learn about our inner compulsions and contractions, learning to soften and release them.
Simultaneously though, meditation also reveals to us the nature of reality, the way life is, how experience forms and impacts on consciousness. This evening and day with Martin Aylward will focus on some of the more difficult aspects of Buddhist teaching, offering ways to make these profound subjects accessible and even obvious.
Martin will lead us experientially into teachings on ‘emptiness’, ’suchness’ and the fluid, ephemeral nature of experience, pointing us towards an immediate and intimate understanding of these deep and important themes. We will learn together how to approach the deep nature of experience, and how the contemplation of these themes transforms us, bringing together the personal and impersonal aspects of Buddhist practice.
In this final talk of the series, Martin looks at the social implications of widening our sense of identification, including not only the world but also other human beings within the field of our experience. The talk explores the suffering born of the us and them mentality and points to how the need to awaken together and take all beings into our heart.
In this talk Martin looks at the tendency to conceive in terms of objects rather than process, unpicking the way we maintain and reinforce the ego structure, and offering a vision of a more expansive and inclusive participation in life.
Continuing from the previous talk, Martin looks at the ways we imagine, maintain and reinforce our psychological sense of self. The talk explores how we live in images and descriptions of who we think we are, layered by our constant critical self evaluation, and points us beyond our psychology to a fuller and freer embodying of our life.
We are bound by our biology, and our health, longevity and death are largely out of our control. This talk explores the way our biology impacts us, including the influences of the sex drive, the survival drive and the social drive. Martin looks at how we can explore and understand our biology in such a way as to inhabit it freely.
In this talk Martin looks at the tendency to conceive in terms of objects rather than process, unpicking the way we maintain and reinforce the ego structure, and offering a vision of a more expansive and inclusive participation in life.
Martin uses this talk to examine the Buddhas description of Dharma practice as Going against the stream of Greed, Hatred and Delusion. He traces these forces in our contemporary lives in their personal, social and global dimensions, inviting us to reflect on how to make an appropriate response to the life in which we find ourselves.
This talk questions our willingness to really be in contact with our experience. Martin explores our tendency to divide ourselves from life, from others and from our own experience, and points the way back to an undivided, undefended existence. The talk also reflects on the natural boundlessness of heart that opens up as a liberated response to different types of experience.
Martin explores different personality styles of resistance and rejection, the ways anger functions and the importance of letting ourselves feel negative emotions as a way of freeing them up and letting go of our personal hard luck story. He also explores the way practice can transform anger into fearlessness as an important force against injustice, oppression and inequality.
On this summer solstice evening out under the trees at Gaia House, Martin reflects on the importance of trees in the Buddhas life, the disingenuousness of the term mindfulness and what it means to be embodied.
Here, Martin looks at the dichotomy we easily make between the retreat situation and the rest of life, and explores the skilful integration of our practice, as well as looking at some of the forces that tend to shape our into our personal, relational and cultural lives.
Using the zen image of first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is, Martin charts the evolution of relating to form and emptiness, exploring the fundamental duality of conventional experience, and the natural pull towards its dismantling, transcendance and integration.
This talk explores bringing the fundamental truth of lifes fluidity, and the familiarity of teachings on impermanence, right into the heart of every-moment practice.
Rather than the meditator trying to become present, this talk emphasises the way life is always immediate and available, always and only present. And how attuning to that invites us into presence, not as a property of mind, not as a state we create, but as the formless ground into which mind can rest, allowing presence to reveal what arises.
Dharma practice points us towards liberation; boundless freedom of being, great depths of love and joy, and a graceful participation in life’s unfolding.
What is liberation?
What seems to be in the way, right now, of living freely?
What is your deepest knowing, and how can it liberate you, here and now?
The day will be led by Martin Aylward, and is open to both committed dharma students, and those who may be totally new to practice, but feel themselves drawn to freedom of being. There will include silent and guided meditation practice, teachings and discussion, and some dialog exercises. The day will emphasize a direct exploration of freeing up our life, right in the midst of living it.
When we hold tightly to our views and positions, we feel like we are right. In this talk Martin explores then tendency to cling to views, to see life through the dichotomies of rational mind that obscure what is outside of our own view. He invites us in to to abiding with life's ambiguity, the inclusion of all opposites, the infinite breadth of the Middle Way.
