This guided practice helps us come into our senses through a body scan. We then rest in the awareness that is listening to and feeling the changing flow of experience. When the mind drifts, the return is a relaxing back to our senses, and to the sea of awareness that includes and experiences the waves of life.
Part 2: Compassion – the tender resonance of heart – awakens as we allow ourselves to be touched by our shared vulnerability.
This series reflects on four primary expressions of an awake, wise heart: lovingkindness, compassion, joy and equanimity. In each talk we explore the habitual patterning that blocks our full realization of these innate capacities, and the understandings and practices that nurture their unfolding.
This heart practice opens with the intention to bring a kind presence to whatever arises. After arriving with a body scan, we are guided to meet all experience with an open tender awareness. The practice ends with a poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer called “Is this the Path of Love?”
Part 1: Lovingkindness – We awaken our natural lovingkindness by learning to attend to and take in the goodness of this life.
This series reflects on four primary expressions of an awake, wise heart: lovingkindness, compassion, joy and equanimity. In each talk we explore the habitual patterning that blocks our full realization of these innate capacities, and the understandings and practices that nurture their unfolding.
Our world is changing faster than we can compute or process. Accompanying these changes are a growing violence, deepening divides, great loss and much uncertainty and fear.
In this week’s talk, I’m joined by Frank Ostaseski to explore teachings and practices that can support us in meeting our inner life and our world with kindness and awareness. Our time includes engagement with those present in a live event.
We awaken a present heart by relaxing with the breath, and bringing the kindness of a smile into our bodily experience. This meditation ends with offering blessings to our inner life and all beings.
Especially when we’re stressed, we need pathways to an allowing, kind presence. This meditation guides us to relax and open through our bodies, and then meet changing waves of experience with a sea of awareness that is intrinsically allowing and tender.
Most of us have habitual ways we create separation from others. This talk takes a look at the roots of our emotional reactivity and ways our meditation practice can foster more loving connection in our lives.
By not resisting, by letting the waves wash through us, we began to relax. Rather than fighting the stormy surges, we rest in an ocean of awareness that embraces all the moving waves. We arrive in a sanctuary that feels large enough to hold whatever was going on.
The medicine our world most needs is compassion, and it is crucial that this include all living beings. Our societal conditioning blinds us to the horror of suffering experienced by non-human animals through our cruel system of factory farming. This conversation looks at how facing and responding to this suffering is necessary for the freedom of our own hearts, and the healing of the world.
