Talks: Reflections on the Path

Desire and Spiritual Freedom
The Buddha taught that becoming identified with “wanting mind” obscures our true nature and binds us in suffering. This talk explores a wise attitude in relating to desire, and offers three pathways towards freedom: Mindfulness of “wanting mind,” trancing back desire to its source, and radical non-clinging.

Relating Wisely to “Wanting Mind”
While desire is intrinsic to life, it can contract into the craving that traps us in suffering. This talk explores how we seek happiness yet become habituated to false refuges–substitutes like over- consuming food, dependent relationships, approval, achieving–that can never bring happiness. Our freedom becomes possible when we forgive the ways we get hooked, and offer a deep, mindful attention to the energies of craving and clinging.

Embodied Spirit
The Buddha taught that mindfulness of the body is a direct path to the realization of truth, to peace and freedom. This talk explores how we leave a present-centered awareness of our body, and the pathways of homecoming.

True Belonging – Refuge in Presence and Relatedness
We become homesick when our insecurity compels us to find refuge in exclusive affiliations, in over-consuming, in avoiding intimacy or grasping tightly to the approval of others. This talk explores how we come home to the truth of who we are by connecting with our moment to moment experience, and by developing the capacity to be wakeful, giving and receptive in loving relationship.

Realizing Our Natural Joy – Part 2
In the buddhist teachings, joy is a natural expression of our awakened heart. In these two talks we will explore how we block off joy, and ways that we can cultivate and embody this intrinsic facet of our being.

Realizing Our Natural Joy – Part 1
In the buddhist teachings, joy is a natural expression of our awakened heart. In these two talks we will explore how we block off joy, and ways that we can cultivate and embody this intrinsic facet of our being.

Beyond Small Self
While we are conditioned to become identified with limited sense of self, we have the capacity to recognize and open to who we are beyond the self. This talk investigates our most compelling domains of getting identified, and the ways a purposeful presence can awaken us.

Meditation and Healing Trauma
Spiritual awakening often involves offering a healing presence to the suffering of post traumatic stress or deep emotional wounding. This talk explores the three key elements that support this process: self-forgiveness, accessing a source of love and safety, and bringing a kind...

The Blessings of Deep Listening
Our capacity to listen deeply–to our inner life and each other–is the grounds of true understanding and love. This talk explores the challenges to listening and guidelines and practices that awaken a listening heart.

Realizing Your True Nature — Four Reflections
This talk explores a Tibetan teaching through reflection and guided meditations: Our true nature–our inherent wakefuness, openness and love–is closer than we can imagine; it is more profound than we can imagine; it is easier than we can imagine; and it is more wondrous than we can imagine.

Trusting Your Basic Goodness
When we don’t trust who we are, we are unable to be at home in our world. This talk explores how we come to be at war with ourselves and the pathway to realizing our basic goodness.

Living Aligned with the Heart
We suffer when our words or actions arise from unconscious wants and fears. This talk explores how we can awaken from the habitual ways we cause harm to ourselves and others, and live from our natural intelligence and tender warmth.

Soul Retrieval (retreat talk)
In many shamanistic cultures, it is believe that when a person is traumatized, the soul leaves the body as a way of protecting itself form intolerable pain. In a ceremony called “soul retrieval,” the traumatized person is held in the love and safety of community as the soul is...

Deepening Practice – Question and Response with Tara
This talk and question and response format addresses the attitudes and practices that cultivate our natural wisdom and compassion.

Part 2 – Presence & Aliveness – Working with Pain
These two talks [part 1 last week] explore how we leave our bodies, the challenge of working with pain, the pathway home to embodied awareness, and the gifts of presence and aliveness.

Part 1 – Presence & Aliveness – Working with Pain
These two talks explore how we leave our bodies, the challenge of working with pain, the pathway home to embodied awareness, and the gifts of presence and aliveness.

Awakening to the Sacred
The tendency to think “life should be different” and to try to control experience removes us from the wisdom and compassion that naturally gives rise to healing and transformation. We learn to trust the power of our heart and awareness by meeting both the pain and beauty of this life with sacred presence.

Taking Refuge
The Buddha taught of three archetypal domains in which we awaken presence and realize freedom. In contrast to our habitual false refuges, these gateways of true refuge are dependable because they express the timeless truth of what we are. This talk shines a light on false refuges, guides us in exploring the meaning of each of the three Buddhist refuges and ends in a ritual of “taking refuge.”

Longing to Belong
Spiritual practice reveals our belonging through bringing presence to three gateways: the aliveness of the present moment, loving relatedness, and the openness and lucidity of awareness itself. This talk includes guided meditations in exploring each gateway. Note: poem, “She Dreamed of Cows” is by Norah Pollard

Gratitude and Generosity
While we value gratitude and generosity, our daily life can often have an undercurrent of complaint and an anxious kind of self-centeredness. This Thanksgiving Eve talk explores teachings and practices that reconnect us with the sense of wonder and abundance that characterizes...
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