This talk explores the transformative power of compassion and kindness. You’ll learn how how to cultivate authentic friendliness in your meditation practice, how to distinguish between pain and suffering and how to heal the judging mind though the practice of forgiveness.

This meditation shifts attention from form to the formless source of all Being. Discover and rest in continuous space, filled with the light of awareness.

While we have evolved to experience a defining sense of separate self, our potential is to awaken to the formless dimension - the pure awareness is our shared source. This talk explores how we can undo the identification with thoughts, emotions and feelings that keeps us landlocked and unable to trust and live from our naturally loving and radiant essence. NOTE: beginning poem is "Landlocked in Fur," by Tukaram, from “Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West” (Ladinksy, 2002)

The bodhisattva path involves a training of our hearts to abandon unskillful states and cultivate qualities of love, compassion, and forgiveness--and envision actions to transform the suffering of others and the world. In the Rwandan genocide and the triumph of freedom and democracy in South Africa we see the suffering that comes from cultivating fear and hatred, and the potential for freedom and peace that results from cultivating forgiveness, compassion, and love. These recent events remind us how much our actions matter, and invite us to become bodhisattvas, committed to the awakening and freedom of all beings.