Gregory has been teaching meditation since 1980. He developed the practice of Insight Dialogue, offering retreats worldwide and authoring books including Insight Dialogue: The Interpersonal Path to Freedom and Dharma Contemplation: Meditating Together with Wisdom Texts.
This short guided meditation with Gregory Kramer invites participants into a spacious silence that supports awareness, curiosity, and presence. The meditation gently encourages letting go of habitual practices and idea to rest in simple awareness. Notice the hum of existence—the subtle energy of body and mind—and how beneath even agitation, words, or thought, there is always silence. The invitation is to listen deeply, beyond noise, toward the ever-present stillness beneath.
Offered May 23, 2024
Gregory Kramer invites the Insight Dialogue Community to celebrate Vesak together. Vesak day is a celebration and recognition of the Buddha’s birth, awakening and death. It usually occurs on the first full moon of May. A common intention set on this day is a recommitment to Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha. This is a day to remember the Buddha's legacy and celebrate our potential for progress on the path to liberation, just as Gotama did before his awakening.
In this talk, Gregory offers the following contemplations:
Do you sense your own humanity? your own potential our own vulnerability?
Does your own humanity connect you to the Buddha? and inspire you?
Many lay Buddhists struggle to carry the benefits of their studies and meditation practice into their twenty-first-century lives. How might our daily experience of both life and the Buddha’s teachings shift if there were no separation between them? Gregory speaks about the realistic and comprehensive vision that arises when we ask this question: If every moment of my life is Path, then what does each path factor need to cover for this to be true in a grounded, practical way?
The Buddha was interested in understanding the human experience; he was not trying to establish a religion. He wondered why there was human suffering? And he is inviting us into this same inquiry.
This recording is a series of talks from various retreats by Gregory Kramer on dosa and adosa stitched together by Insight Dialogue Community member, Kathy Beck-Coon. She wrote up guidance on how this recording can be used for Insight Dialogue practice and to support practice groups. In addition, Insight Dialogue member, Anne Symington, wrote up a summary of the teachings and a timestamp summary of the audio.
Receiving with compassion what is difficult / receiving joy / experiencing mutual equanimity. Guided meditation on the boundless with Open for the first 14:15 minutes. " there is an aspect of Open that is establishing the field of awareness that is the atmosophere in which Metta arises."
Four part contemplation, first two separate speaker, last one the entire group
1. "Observe the opening of awareness to every cell of the vody, naming what it is like. This awareness is inclusive and spacious."
Contemplate something in your life that is difficult, feeling your heart vibrating with the pain". " Be present to the pain waith compassion for this being, the compassionate response".
"Listener, how was it like to receive this?"
2. Now the gift of our practice is to touch joy, something positive, wholesome, uplifting. Let it infuse you, vibrate within you."
Listener, touch the experience of hearing about joy.
3." Whatever experience that might be present of mutual or sympathetic equanimity,where the heart balances together."
4. "What is manifesting now? Resting perhaps in the shared human experience of the whole of it; the hurt, the joy the boundless."
Dyad with separate speakers for the first two contemplations
1. straight-forward suffering. The pain can be proliferated and held up and at this micro-level flips into Dukka-dukka
2.the dukka of impermanence, that comes with the instability of things and our responses
" Give attention to the quality of receiving."
" What is it like to be speaking of this pain of impermanence....; to be hearing it?"
3.the suffering associated waith constructions and the constructing mind
"Those images that come and haunt the mind."
"That ongoing tumult of the body-mind responding to its own fabrications."
"Can we get off the bus?"
1 - Exploring Open In A Group of Three; 2 - Trust Emergence / Exploring Impermanence; 3 - Walking Outdoors In Groups of Three While Observing Impermanence; 4 - Trust Emergence / Experience Of Major Change In Personal Or Professional Life; 5 - Trust Emergence / "What Plans Do You Have Now?"; 6 - What Is Emergent Now?
1 - Observing Qualities Of Mind -- Presence Or Absence Of Lust, Hatred, Delusion; 2 - Observing The Meditating Mind -- Is The Mind Agitated Or Calm, Bright Or Dull; 3 - Is The Quality Of Mind Cultivated Or Raw, Surpassed Or Unsurpassed;
