Working with sexual energy (0:08); social justice in line with Dhamma (15:20); mindfulness, thinking, speaking & listening (35:03)

When we are stressed, our attention narrows and fixates, often into obsessive thinking, worry and judgment. This meditation relaxes and opens the mind, first by a body scan and a “smile down,” and then by including all changing experience in a spacious awareness. As our attention shifts from mind objects like sensation and sound to the space of awareness itself, we discover the Beingness that is our formless home.

Instructions for restraining the human tendency to dominate. Learning to set up the right relationship and allow experience to speak for itself. Only after the truth is spoken can there be silence.

Listening to sounds is a powerful way to quiet the thinking mind and connect with the natural openness of awareness. In this guided meditation, we begin by opening to sound and then listening to and feeling the whole changing flow of life – allowing whatever is here to be just as it is. In the foreground, we notice the dance of sensations, thoughts, emotions…rising up and falling away. And in the background, a wakeful, receptive presence – the silence that is listening. When we let go of all doing and relax back into this alert stillness, we sense our true nature…our home. In words from the Tibetan tradition: “Utterly awake, senses wide open. Utterly open, non-fixating, allowing awareness.”

If we are suffering, we are believing an interpretation of reality that is limiting and untrue. At these times we are imprisoned in a painful looping of fear-driven thoughts and feelings. This talk explores the ways our practices of mindfulness, compassion and loving presence can guide us from addictive thinking to perceiving life with a wise heart.

Settling into sitting meditation, tracing posture and energy up the back and down the front, spherical breathing from abdomen. [Bell at 38:17] [Instructions at 40:27] Invitation to loosen the intensity and congestion of thought - vaci-sankhāra, that which forms thought energy. Rather than not thinking, take time to formulate what to think about and bring heart qualities into that. This is a dhamma practice.

Every moment has flavor tone of experience: pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. Typically, we react without thinking and act from attachment, aversion or delusion-the seeds of suffering. When we bring mindfulness to the moment we have the choice to respond with non-greed, non-hatred and non-delusion. Those are the seed of true happiness.

This meditation awakens us to the space and aliveness in these bodies, and to resting in wakeful openness. When we get lost in thought, we practice relaxing open, and exploring the gap between thoughts. By opening beyond the veil of thinking, we discover the Beingness that is home.