Stories and humor from beloved teacher Ajahn Brahm.

Guided practice for directly experiencing the four elements in the body, followed by reading of Mary Oliver's "Humpbacks."

The Buddha's contemplation of the four elements — earth, water, fire, and air — offers a gentle but radical path: from the conceit of "my body" to the felt sense of being nature itself. A guided exploration of elemental awareness, grounded in retreat experience, Satipatthana practice, and the luminous body-wisdom of beloved poets.

Deep Welcome, Reflections on Retreat and Metta Practice

How does loving-kindness infuse every dimension of the path? Drawing from a sweat-drenched pilgrimage around Shikoku's 88 temples, Devon explores metta not as a single technique but as a way of life woven through the Eightfold Path — from wise intention and ethical attunement, through generosity and letting go, to the boundless radiance of the brahmaviharas. Along the way, we discover how metta practice can open into concentration, healing, and even emptiness itself, and how the original instructions invite us simply to fill our bodies and the whole world with a field of care.

Moving from body to choiceless attention to awarenenss of awareness, we consider the Bahiya Sutta and how it points to the not-self nature of things.

Drawing from the Culasunyatta Sutta and the teaching to Bahiya, this talk explores how the entire Buddhist path unfolds within the immediacy of our sensory experience. Emptiness is revealed not as a metaphysical abstraction but as the progressive letting go of what distracts us from what is peaceful—a movement from palace to forest to space to freedom itself. The whole world exists within this fathom-long body and its six sense doors. Liberation happens here, in the seen, heard, sensed, and cognized—not through traveling to some distant realm, but through radical presence with what is. When we meet each moment of contact with the quality of spiritual friendship, recognizing the loving awareness we already are, even the difficult journey over open ocean becomes workable. We learn to fly between the lives we have and the lives we imagine, without the extra burden of complaint, held by the spaciousness of mind itself.

Teachings and Guidance on RAIN meditation.

What if aging, illness, and death aren't enemies to avoid, but teachers bowing at our feet? This talk explores the Buddha's radical invitation to turn toward life's inevitable difficulties—not with morbidity, but with the clear-eyed realism that sets us free. Through poetry, contemporary dharma voices, and the ancient practice of death awareness, we discover how contemplating our mortality doesn't diminish joy—it ignites it. When we stop living heedlessly and wake up to the preciousness of this breath, this moment, this life, we find the courage to love completely and let go gracefully. A New Year's reflection on endings, beginnings, and the alchemy that transforms suffering into compassion.

Teachings and guided meditation on mindfulness of the body using sensations, sounds, and breath.