Relating Wisely with Fear Part 1 and 2 - While fear is essential to survival, it can also strangle our capacity to live fully and awaken spiritually. These two talks explore how fear takes over our lives, and the ways we can train our attention to free ourselves from its grip.
This talk, in honor of Wesak, looks at the Buddha's life both as the story of an actual person, and as an archetypal story of a spiritual journey, exploring some of the ways that his life & journey may relate to and inform our practice as we follow in his footsteps.
Relating Wisely with Fear Part 1 and 2 - While fear is essential to survival, it can also strangle our capacity to live fully and awaken spiritually. These two talks explore how fear takes over our lives, and the ways we can train our attention to free ourselves from its grip.
Once we have accepted the fact that we cannot control the dharma, our practice opens up to the full catastrophe of living. We open first by backing away from our egoic demands and then by infusing our actions with the wisdom of the body.
We come to dharma practice with a longing for freedom. This talk explores both the longing, in its importance for awakening the heart and nourishing the spiritual journey, and the Freedom of Being - our capacity to fully and freely inhabit and respond to life, to which this longing points.
Breaking the Chains of Craving: Part 4, with guest Kevin Griffin. Beginning introductions of Inquiring Mind publisher Alan Novidor and editor Barbara Gates.
The Buddha taught that becoming identified with "wanting mind" obscures our true nature and binds us in suffering. This talk explores a wise attitude in relating to desire, and offers three pathways towards freedom: Mindfulness of "wanting mind," trancing back desire to its source, and radical non-clinging.
The judging mind helps hold the sense of self as a static entity. Compassion allows us to be with all manifestations, however painful, allowing for healing and release.
We get pulled away from ourselves in different ways. This talk explores both the mechanisms of how we get disconnected from being present, and how come those mechanisms exert such a powerful pull on our consciousness. The exploration encourages a careful and caring investigation of those obstacles, as the way to understand, and liberate them.
The mechanisms of judgment, shame and blame are misguided attempts to protect ourselves when we have no other resources. We can now see how they are unskillful and connect with our inherent beautiful qualities as a resource to meet these energies and let them go.
