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.

An introduction to 5 days of retreat practice, using the inherent characteristics of life as the grounds for contemplation and insight.

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.

Martin explores the indivisible nature of life, the mystery of an existence that is constantly slipping away from us, and love as the true heart's response to the inevitability of death. This talk stands alone, yet also builds on the themes of the previous two teachings from the same retreat.

Avoiding fixed positions and judgements about desire, Martin encourages an open inquiry into wanting. He examines the root of all desire; wanting things to be different, and explores how we can use wanting as a mirror to learn from our reflected experience. The talk points towards the deep desire to give up our endless interventions and manipulation of our experience, and discusses the freedom of undemanding, undefended, undistracted awareness.

In this talk, Martin explores the ideas and images we hold of Body, the habitual ways we react to bodily experience and body image, and the tendency to relate to body as a thing rather than a process. He guides the listener through the direct experience of body as a fluid, edgeless, inconceivable unfolding, inviting us to more and more inhabit the visceral ground of all experience; the body of life.

We long for inner space and peace, yet we also defend against it, compulsively filling the open space of consciousness with the endless mental proliferation that gives us our sense of self and world. In this talk Martin explores the 3 major expressions of this inner momentum, showing us ways to recognise, understand, and let go of our demands, defences and distractions, and allowing instead the genuine, wide open spaciousness of our nature.

This was an off-site Gaia House retreat held at Seale-Hayne, Devon

This talk looks at the way we respond to life when consciousness is not caught in obsessions or reactivity. Martin explores 4 specifically different dimensions of love (Brahma Viharas) and invokes their commonality in dissolving our sense of separateness; beckoning us into an exquisite intimacy with life.

This talk looks at the inevitability in language of either reifying or negating existence; "It (self) exists" or "it doesn't exist", and how either view is problematic, inviting us in the living immediacy of life, to discover the middle way beyond existing or not-existing.

Martin explores how our various views condition our experience, and keep us locked into viewing and reacting to life in all too familiar ways. We look at the way our views limit our experience of who we are, and how investigating those views can lead us into a more ambiguous, and more liberated sense of our participation in life.

Martin explores the mechanism of wanting, the felt sense of different types of desire, and 3 ways of contemplating wanting in order to understand it more fully, and to free our relationship with desire.

Anupadana, meaning non-clinging (often translated as letting go), is the very essence of Dharma practice. This introductory talk looks at the specifics of cultivating a non-clinging attitude with respect our physical, emotional, and mental experience.

However we describe our practice, we are longing for happiness and ease. This talk explores how we get in our own way with that, pursuing ideas of happiness while missing something fundamental about our very existence which can bring us back into the freedom of being which beckons us. Like the Sufi poet Hafiz says, "Ever since Happiness first heard your name, it has been running through the streets crying out to you."

The series of 5 talks from this retreat explore a central feature of Dharma practice and teachings: How we get uptight and reactive (Upadana / Clinging) around our experience, and the transformational possibility of letting go. The talks cover the Buddhas teachings on the 3 main realms of experience that we cling most tightly to, as well as exploring and pointing towards the nature of the heart that is free from clinging. This fifth and closing talk looks at the affective quality of our experience in the heart. This explores the subjective experience of clinging as greed, hatred and delusion, and Martin points out how as the heart clarifies, it naturally rests into the expanded states of different forms of love.

The series of 5 talks from this retreat explore a central feature of Dharma practice and teachings: How we get uptight and reactive (Upadana / Clinging) around our experience, and the transformational possibility of letting go. The talks cover the Buddhas teachings on the 3 main realms of experience that we cling most tightly to, as well as exploring and pointing towards the nature of the heart that is free from clinging. Starting with the existential, progressing towards the personal, this fourth talk explores the Buddhas teachings on the third realm of clinging - to existence and non-existence. Martin explores what we identify with - as well as what we dont, and our limited capacity to only conceive in terms of is or isnt, exists or doesnt, while pointing to a way of meeting life that isnt constrained by this reductive dichotomy.

The series of 5 talks from this retreat explore a central feature of Dharma practice and teachings: How we get uptight and reactive (Upadana / Clinging) around our experience, and the transformational possibility of letting go. The talks cover the Buddhas teachings on the 3 main realms of experience that we cling most tightly to, as well as exploring and pointing towards the nature of the heart that is free from clinging. This third talk explores how our ideas, beliefs and opinions obscure our true knowing of reality. Martin progresses through our views about life itself, unconsciously conditioned by both scientific and religious cultural myths, our views about and in relation to others, and our painful, evaluating views of ourselves. The encouragement is to examine our beliefs so as to make them transparent, to see life clearly, to recognize its freely unfolding process that cannot be defined by mere idea or view.

The series of 5 talks from this retreat explore a central feature of Dharma practice and teachings: How we get uptight and reactive (Upadana / Clinging) around our experience, and the transformational possibility of letting go. The talks cover the Buddhas teachings on the 3 main realms of experience that we cling most tightly to, as well as exploring and pointing towards the nature of the heart that is free from clinging. This second talk explores the powerful force of wanting, and how to meet, explore and understand our clinging to desire. Martin encourages us to inhabit the movement of wanting more fully, leaving aside the objects of our desire in order to be more fully with the wanting itself. Offering three different ways for working with desire, we are pointed towards a freedom from both the obsessing about what we want, and from its opposite; the denying the dynamism and depth at the heart of our longing.

The series of 5 talks from this retreat explore a central feature of Dharma practice and teachings: How we get uptight and reactive (Upadana / Clinging) around our experience, and the transformational possibility of letting go. The talks cover the Buddhas teachings on the 3 main realms of experience that we cling most tightly to, as well as exploring and pointing towards the nature of the heart that is free from clinging. This introductory talk looks at the broad 3-fold field of our experience corresponding to the experience of body, heart and mind; Sensation, Feeling and Thought. Martin explores the differences in meditative approach to working with the different elements of experience, and invokes the teaching of the Middle Way in avoiding the extremes of on the one hand obsessing / wallowing in our experience, and on the other rejecting / denying / shutting down to what is happening.

An exploration of the ten most frequently raised questions, concerns and issues of Dharma practitioners, in sustaining and deepening practice in their everyday life.

This talk uses the Buddha's model of the Middle Way to explore our tendencies to get caught either in obsessing about self, others and world, or in trying to reject and deny the same. Martin points to a creative, dynamic engagement with experience which reflects the title of the talk.

This talk links the concerns of our life, the tendencies of our minds, and the practice of meditation. Martin explores the way our conditioning and mental attitudes colour all our perceptions, and explores how dharma practice invites us to see through our acquired mental shaping, beyond our ideas, to meet life as directly, as deeply, as freely as possible.