A dharma talk exploring anattā through the five aggregates and the Anattālakkhaṇa Sutta, alongside Anāthapiṇḍika's deathbed teaching from Sāriputta. Weaves impermanence and death contemplation together with not-self - drawing on Thanissaro Bhikkhu's pragmatic (not metaphysical) framing of not-self - and closes with mettā as the natural fruit of a loosened, undefended heart.

Reflections and guided practice on embodiment

A talk on tranquility as its own awakening factor, not a lesser cousin of joy or concentration. We look at how calm arises naturally out of a happy mind that knows how to let go, what it actually feels like in the body, and how it matures into the absorption of samadhi and, further still, into a stillness governed by equanimity rather than effort.

A talk on unworldly pleasant vedana — the kind of ease and contentment that doesn't depend on anything going right. We trace how letting go registers in the body as pleasure before the mind has words for it, and learn to stay with it, let it spread, and receive it rather than manufacture it.

What does it mean to truly keep a vow to ourselves? Devon Hase explores adhiṭṭhāna—the cultivation of resolve—as both the courage to stay with what is difficult and the wisdom to soften, surrender, and listen when pushing harder becomes its own form of self-abandonment.

What does it mean to truly keep a vow to ourselves? Devon Hase explores *adhiṭṭhāna*—the cultivation of resolve—as both the courage to stay with what is difficult and the wisdom to soften, surrender, and listen when pushing harder becomes its own form of self-abandonment.

This closing talk distills the sixteen steps of the Ānāpānasati Sutta into what's most portable for daily life — calming the body, calming the mind, opening the heart, and letting go — offered as one continuous gesture rather than four separate teachings. We'll explore simple, concrete tools for carrying retreat-mind into ordinary moments, and extend the practice into patience and sīla as it meets daily relationship and speech. The talk closes with reflections on love, belonging, and letting go: what becomes possible once the hands are finally empty enough to receive what is already here.

In this guided meditation, the breath becomes a frame - a halo around whatever picture we slot into it - as we move through the third tetrad's four ways of looking at the mind. We'll settle into the stillness already underneath the mind's activity, the way silence sits beneath sound; let a basic gladness surface, an inward brightness already present rather than something we have to chase down; gather the mind into a felt sense of wholeness and integration; and finally practice the small, ordinary liberations already available to us - the fist opening, the self growing quieter, a way of looking that's already free.

Drawing on Bhikkhu Anālayo's scholarship on the Ānāpānasati Sutta, this talk explores the second tetrad of mindfulness of breathing: the four steps in which joy, happiness, and the subtler mental formations become doorways into deep practice. We look at why pleasure, met clearly, has always belonged on the path, and how the Buddha's own early memory of ease under a rose-apple tree pointed him toward awakening long before any formal practice did. Along the way we'll draw on the words of contemporary BIPOC and queer dharma teachers on what it means to actually receive joy in the body, and explore practical instructions for steeping in wholesome pleasure and calming it without losing it.

Drawing from their new book "This Messy, Gorgeous Love: A Buddhist Guide to Lasting Partnership", devon and nico share practical insights on bringing mindfulness and compassion into the beautiful complexity of intimate relationships. A guided meditation is followed by a teaching.