Mark Coleman has been engaged in meditation practice since 1981, primarily within the Insight meditation tradition. He has been teaching meditation retreats since 1997. His teaching is also influenced by his studies with Advaita Vedanta and Tibetan teachers in Asia and the West, and through his teacher training with Jack Kornfield. Mark primarily teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California, though he also teaches nationally, in Europe and India.
He leads backpacking retreats, nature-based retreats, and teaches retreats for environmental activists in the wilderness at Vallecitos Mountain Refuge in New Mexico, and at Knoll Farm in Vermont. In the Bay Area, Mark has a counseling practice, where he integrates his studies of psychotherapy and meditative work. He is the author of “Awake in the Wild - Mindfulness in Nature as a path of Self-Discovery." Mark has been an avid hiker, and backpacker for most of his life and spends much of his time in the outdoors. He lives in the woods in Marin County, Northern California.
Deep wisdom teachings use the language of poetry, metaphor and simile to point to the timeless truths. In this talk Mark shares examples of wisdom teachings from Buddhist sources throughout the ages.
The Buddha's teaching on Papancha - the proliferating tendency of mind - obscures a natural freedom and peace. This talk explores how proliferation happens conditioned by desire, aversion, views and the sense of personal identity and how awareness is key in understanding this pattern and freeing it.
What is mindfulness - how can we develop it in our meditation and lives and how does awareness reveal freedom and its obstacles - i.e. the hindrances to meditate and how to to overcome them.
What is the self, how is it constructed - Who do you take yourself to be. This talk explains how to examine the nature of self - the attachment to self image/identity & how a mindful relationship to it can bring much clarity & peace.
How do you work with desire and attachment in the midst of daily life? Buddhist teachings give clear guidance on the power of exploring and understanding how the process of attachment arises and how we can cultivate a healthy relationship to desire and the sensory world. Mark gives many anecdotes from his personal journey with this theme.
The Buddha taught about 4 kinds of attachment - one of those is attachment to views & opinions. This talk explores understanding views & how to work with our attachment to them.
What is your relationship to gratitude? How do you orient to the world? Noticing the blessings and knowing you have enough - or focusing on what is missing?
This talk explores the origins and negative impacts of the judging mind and how to practically understand and use effective procedures based in mindfulness, metta, and inquiry.
Taking our practice into the world. The Buddha's teaching on the eightfold path guides us to look at every aspect of our lives. This path focuses on the
stages of ethics, livelihood and wise speech.
What is mindfulness - what are the essential aspects of mindfulness and what are the key points elucidated by the Buddha in how to use mindfulness as a path to awaken.
Lama Palden Gyatso, incarcerated and tortured for 33 years in Tibet by the Chinese, talks about his experience and how practice helped him through horrific suffering.
One Earth Sangha is oriented toward Buddhist and mindfulness practitioners seeking dharma, practices and community around care for the Earth. See their website here: One Earth Sangha
What is wisdom - How do we cultivate an experiential, lived wisdom in our lives, so we live wisely in our relationships with ourselves, each other and the world...
How do we take the wisdom, clarity and insight and the depth of meditative experience into our lives, relationships and all that we do. At the same time, knowing that it is all a seamless continuity of mindful awareness.
Joy is an essential factor of awakening and every step of the Buddhist path supports an opening to happiness, joy and peace -- all the way to Nibbana -- the greatest happiness.
How do we turn towards and open to the inevitable pain and suffering in life? This talk explores how to meet our difficulty with a kind loving presence and patience and in doing so create a freedom, peace and ease in our hearts.
What is investigation as a factor of awakening? How do we cultivate it, what supports it and how do we apply it to our direct experience in meditation.
How do we stay mindful in the world of technology, email and internet? How Buddhist teachings on mindfulness and intention help give us presence in the midst of it all.
How do we bring a loving presence to all of our experience- especially to our humanness, failed intentions. Cultivating mindfulness & kindness with our own experience becomes the template for living a wise life.
This talk continues an exploration of the Buddhas teachings in the Paramis - specifically focusing on the Parimi of Love ( metta) energy, persistence, truthfulness and morality.
This talk focuses on the development of 5 of the 10 Paramis: generosity, truthfulness, equanimity, renunciation and wisdon - how they are both innate and also elemental beautiful qualities on the path.
An exploration of the quality of love: what is it, how it manifests on the meditative journey and the exploration between emptiness and love; how love unfolds as we lessen identification with a sense of separation.
Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 Meditation) What is necessary for maintaining our practice in daily life, through inspiration, silence, Sangha and informal practice of mindfulness.
What is the Buddha's teaching on interdependence that arises from practice & what is his teaching on the nature of reality. It is inter- dependent and inter-connected.
How do the practices of mindfulness and metta (loving kindness) work together - and the important of bringing a kind loving presence to working with difficulties and pain.
Using the metaphor of light as awareness, this talk weaves in poetry, and teachings of the Buddha to explore the role of mindfulness in the path of practice.
How do the practices of mindfulness, metta and compassion weave together and support our journey in wholeness, healing and the end of suffering. This talk also relates how these practices support the work of psychotherapists and healers.
How to work with Desire. Understanding its bind of attachment, craving & aversion - using humor & awareness as supports for freeing ourselves from desires grip.
The Buddha stressed the importance of "being a lamp unto ourself" and to know the truth of suffering - as a vehicle for understanding & liberating ourselves from inevitable challenges of life.
The Buddha gave many teachings to explore how self-identity and attachment to self arise through identification with the five skandas/aggregates (body, feelings, perceptions, mental processes and consciousness). this talk explores this theme and how to work with the "selfing" process.
The Buddha spoke highly of the value of Sangha, as a refuge and a support for practice & understanding. This talk explores what Sangha is & its positive values.
As human beings, we move between the boundless, profound dimensions and the more mundane, worldly realms of body and mind. How do we in our practice cultivate an openness and receptivity to our boundless nature and not be so caught in our mind.
Mindfulness practice and the body - Learning to cultivate the awareness of the body as temple, as mystery and as a vehicle for mindfulness and awakening
This talk explores the Buddha's central teaching on the Four Noble Truths - how to understand and work with the reality of suffering, the forces of desire and aversion (the causes of suffering) and how that leads to the possibility of freedom (Third Noble Truth).
How does our meditation practice relate to the natural world? How does nature support our awakening. This talk explores how nature supports us to be more aware & develop awe, wonder, love, appreciation, peace and connectedness.
What is Equanimity? Why is it so difficult to be at ease in difficult circumstances. What supports this beautiful quality of the heart and how does it relate to metta (love), compassion and appreciative joy.
This talk gives a thorough overview of the practice and application of metta (unconditional love). Also explored is the unity of mindfulness and metta, and how when metta is cultivated it becomes a source of wisdom in our lives.
Mindfulness of the body as a vehicle of awakening - this talk explores what's challenging about being in the body - working with physical pain, difficult emotions, and how mindfulness practice helps bring insight and ease.
This talk discusses the Buddha's Teaching and the Enneagram's teaching on suffering; its cause and cessation and how the development of compassion heals and transforms suffering in ourselves and in the world.
What are the joys and fruits of the practice of Vipassana/mindfulness?
This talk elaborates the peace, joy, freedom that arises from meditation; especially in regard to seeing clearly the nature of thought, papanca and disengaging from the delusions of mind.
This talk points to how human beings straddle both mundane and divine realities. How we live dominated by left brain conceptual mind and how we have the potential to know dimensions of peace and freedom more characterized by the right brain hemisphere.
