Talks: Reflections on the Path
Three Liberating Gifts: Part 2 – Inner Fire
This 3 part series is based on a teaching story from the Upanishads that shows our potential to awaken from an ego-based trance and discover the full luminosity and freedom of our natural awareness. In each class we'll explore one of the three gifts considered as essential on...
Three Liberating Gifts: Part 1 – Forgiveness
This 3 part series is based on a teaching story from the Upanishads that shows our potential to awaken from an ego-based trance and discover the full luminosity and freedom of our natural awareness. In each class we'll explore one of the three gifts considered as essential on...
Freedom from Fear-Based Beliefs
This talk looks at how we get imprisoned in fear based, limiting beliefs. We then explore key meditative steps that help release these veils and reveal the fullness and goodness of our essential being.
Sure Heart’s Release
The pathway to our awakened heart includes deep recognition of our barriers to love, and as we open, the courage to express our love. This talk includes a reflection and practice that can support us in inhabiting our full capacity for loving presence....
From Dragons to Schmoos – Meeting Life with Compassionate Presence
The trance of unworthiness is sustained by our aversion to the dragons – the difficult emotions and related behaviors that are a deeply conditioned part of the human experience. In this talk we explore the awakening that is possible as we recognize our reactive patterns and instead of judgment, offer a loving and healing presence.
Part 2: Basic Elements of Meditation Practice
This two-part series offers a clear and fresh understanding of practices that cultivate mindful awareness. The first class examines our attitude towards practice and gives guidance on posture, establishing an anchor for attention, and learning to concentrate and collect the...
Part 1: Basic Elements of Meditation Practice
This two-part series offers a clear and fresh understanding of practices that cultivate mindful awareness. The first class examines our attitude towards practice and gives guidance on posture, establishing an anchor for attention, and learning to concentrate and collect the...
Inhabiting Our Bodies with Presence
Our conditioning is to pull away from our physical experience when it is difficult. When we regularly dissociate, we are removed from the source of our power, intuition and capacity to love in a full way. This talk looks at the ways we leave our body and the path of homecoming to living loving presence.
Listening to the Calling of Our Hearts
In any moment, our intention - what we are energetically wanting - shapes our life experience. While our deepest intention may be to realize and live from loving awareness, we are often driven by egoic fear and grasping. This talk explores how mindfulness can recognize our...
Refuge in Loving Relationships
Bringing presence to our relationships reveals our connectedness and essential Oneness. This talk explores two domains of this awakening with others: Realizing our shared vulnerability - that we’re in it together - and recognizing the inherent goodness or sacredness that lives...
Taking Refuge in Your Own True Nature
The three classic refuges of Buddha (awareness), Dharma (truth) and Sangha (loving relatedness) are each expressions of our deepest essence. This talk reflects on the refuges and includes guided meditations and a closing ritual that helps us remember the pathway home in our...
Retreat Meditation: Forgiving Ourselves and Others
Instruction and guided heart forgiveness practice from the 2014 IMCW New Year's Retreat.
Landlocked in Fur – Three Domains of Formless Presence (Retreat Talk)
2014-12-30 - Retreat Talk - Landlocked in Fur - Three Domains of Formless Presence - 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...
Part 2: Intimacy with Life
This season is one of celebrating the light and love that is our unifying source. And yet at these times our society is being forced to face its deep patterning of racial oppression, amongst other expressions of violence. These two talks investigate the process of turning...
Part 1: Intimacy with Life
This season is one of celebrating the light and love that is our unifying source. And yet at these times our society is being forced to face its deep patterning of racial oppression, amongst other expressions of violence. These two talks investigate the process of turning...
Taking Refuge
This class explores the three classic gateways to true refuge - Buddha (awareness); Dharma (path, truth of reality) and Sangha (spiritual friends, loving relatedness). It includes reflections and a ceremony that supports us in remembering the pathway home. (1:02:41)
A Generous Heart
Our deep potential is to live from an awake, loving heart. This talk looks at how, with a kind and mindful attention, we can decondition habitual tendencies toward grasping and self-centeredness, and nourish the sense of connectedness and care that gives rise to generosity. As...
Awakening Through Change and Loss
Our capacity to live and love fully is entirely related to how we open to the truth of impermanence. This talk examines how our ways of trying to control life solidify our perception of being separate and threatened. We then look at the wings of mindful presence and compassion that open us to loss and grief, and reveal the loving awareness that is beyond birth and death.
The Sacred Art of Listening
Just as presence is the heart of meditation, so deep listening is at the center of all conscious, loving relationships. This talk explores how our wants and fears block listening, ways we can deepen our capacity for listening, and the healing that unfolds when we truly feel heard by another.
Radical Self-Honesty: The Joy of Getting Real
Our suffering arises from the unseen, unfelt, resisted parts of our psyche. This talk explores ways we can deepen self-honesty and reconnect to a wholeness of being that enables us to live with spontaneity, confidence, wisdom and love.
Quote from Elizabeth Lesser: “My prayer to god every day: Remove the veils so I might see what is really happening here and not be intoxicated by my stories and my fears.”
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