Short Reflection & Guided Meditation | Earthworm Practice for the Anthropocene | Online Wednesday-Mornings

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.

Luang Mae talked about Nibbana at the Songdhammakalyani Monastery in Thailand.

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.

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?”

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.

This meditation awakens our senses, then guides us to rest in the changing flow of experience. When the mind drifts, we are invited to relax back into full living presence, into that Beingness that is the center of now. “Listening to and feeling, the changing flow – right here, right in the center of now.”

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.

This talk was offered at East Bay Dhamma

Our pathway to peace and happiness is through opening, with tenderness, to our moment-to-moment experience. This meditation guides us first to be awake in our body and senses, and then to include the changing flow of life in a spacious, kind heart. We close with a short verse from poet Dorothy Hunt – “Peace Is This Moment Without Judgment.”

Executive coach and author Stephen Josephs has worked with many top business leaders, guiding them in transcending the egoic conditioning that limit their impact on other people, and on societal change. In this conversation we look at what he’s learned about inner freedom and awakening from his own trauma, from 60 years of spiritual practice, from models of adult development, and from the poetry of Lao Tzu. Stephen and Tara have been close friends for over 50 years, and she considers him her first inspiration for a dedicated practice of meditation. His website is stephenjosephs.com.

We spend great swaths of time in a trance that removes us from awareness of our body and senses. This meditation reconnects us by scanning through the body, including sounds and then resting in the field of awareness and aliveness. We practice relaxing and gently arriving again when thoughts carry us away; learning the pathway home to living presence.

Most people get depressed at times, and many suffer greatly from bouts of major depression. At the heart of the suffering is the experience of severed belonging—of being imprisoned in the pain of separation, unworthiness, unlovability and hopelessness. These two talks explore several meditation practices that reconnect us with our natural aliveness, openheartedness and awareness. They empower us to develop our inner resources, energize us to awaken, free us from rumination and remind us that we are not our depressive thoughts and feelings. The growing realization of the loving awareness that is our home heals the very roots of depression.