Talks: Reflections on the Path

Freedom In the Midst of Fear – Part II
One understanding of the spiritual path is relating wisely to fear. Our conditioned reaction is to feel aversion to fear and do anything but simply experience it. We discover freedom when instead of reacting, we recognize and open to fear with a kind, committed presence. While...

Freedom In the Midst of Fear – Part I
One understanding of the spiritual path is relating wisely to fear. Our conditioned reaction is to feel aversion to fear and do anything but simply experience it. We discover freedom when instead of reacting, we recognize and open to fear with a kind, committed presence. While...

Charla: Parte 1: Refugio en el Miedo
Relacionarse sabiamente con el miedo es una de las formas de entendimiento del camino spiritual. Estamos condicionados a sentir una reacción de aversión hacia el miedo, y hacemos todo lo que podemos para no experimentar el miedo. Si en vez de reaccionar, reconocemos y nos...

The Undefended Heart – Healing Our World
Our dedication to not pushing anyone–or any part of ourselves–out of our hearts, serves the healing of our world. This talk includes a short guided meditation on opening to our human vulnerability and forgiving another person.

Relaxed Attentiveness
While the heart of meditation is resting in open awareness, our conditioning to be distracted and reactive can keep us on the wheel of suffering. We awaken from trace by developing skillful ways of paying attention that create the environment for natural presence. This natural awareness, while sometimes hidden, is always here: It is our true home.

Thanksgiving – Living the Life Fully: Gratitude & Generosity
While generosity and gratitude are natural capacities, our conditioning to want life different can often keep us from living from a free and open heart. This talk explores three gateways to awakening and expressing love in our daily life.

The Three Characteristics: Part 3 – No Self
At the center of the Buddhist teachings is the understanding that the passing phenomena of this world--sounds, sensations, thoughts, bodies and minds--have no self at the center, no self as owner, and are not happening to a self. In other words, our familiar sense of self is an...

The Three Characteristics: Part 2 – Impermanence
The Buddha taught that when our understanding of impermanence is direct and non-conceptual, it is liberating. By directly opening to the radical impermanence of all experience, including the truth of our own mortality, we discover the natural capacity to let go. With this “mind that clings to no thing” awakens wisdom, authentic spontaneity and a natural cherishing of life.

The Three Characteristics: Part 1 – Unsatisfactoriness
The Buddha described three basic and interrelated insights into nature of reality that are revealed through a clear and deep attention. Called “the three characteristics,” these insights include dukkha (unsatisfactoriness), annicha (impermanence) and annata (selflessness or emptiness). In the first of this three week series of talks, we explore the meaning of dukkha, how we directly recognize the varied expressions of dukkha and it’s gift when met with full presence.

Equanimity in the Face of Conflict
This talk, given on the eve of a presidential debate, explores how we can awaken from the conditioning that turns us against ourselves and others. The guided meditation offers an opportunity to choose a place of conflict and reactivity with others, and discover what is possible...

Inviting Mara to Tea
One of the great archetypal themes in the Buddha's life is facing Mara, the shadow side of greed, hatred and delusion. Rather than being seduced, fighting or running away, the Buddha simply recognized Mara's presence and invited him to tea. This talk and guided meditation...

Soul Retrieval
When we become stressed and reactive, we lose contact with our natural spontaneity, wisdom and openheartedness. This talk investigates the ways we become caught in the stress-trance and the key elements in awakening: pausing and remindfulness. Using the gateway of the senses,...

A Committed Presence
Our conditioning is to feel separate, creating an “other” out there, and often being at war with ourselves. By cultivating a committed presence we awaken beyond this conditioning. This talk includes stories and reflections that identify limiting beliefs and reveal our intrinsic oneness and love.

Turning Towards What you Love
There is a saying: The road to hell is paved with bad intentions. From the Buddha we learn the path to freedom arises from wise intentions. Yet because we habitually grasp after what will immediately relieve or comfort or please us, we often do not listen to our deepest...

Listening To Our Life
Listening in a full and open way allows us to come home to our natural state–awake, vast awareness. In an immediate way, a listening attention dissolves the tangles of fear and craving that obscure our wholeness. This class includes both a talk and guided meditations on deep listening to our inner experience and with others.

Behind the Mask
We each develop and become identified with masks that express a false or narrowed sense of self. Whether it’s the helper mask or addict mask, the controller mask or loser mask, the beliefs and emotions creating the mask prevent us from realizing our natural wholeness and beauty. This talk explores how, in the face of inevitable change and loss, we can remember the presence and love that is peering through the mask.

Let Everything Happen to You
The ways we try to control our life imprisons us in a contracted, fearful sense of self. Yet when we contemplate letting go of control, there is a sense that we will be endangered, that we will fail, that something will go wrong. This talk explores how, if we have the courage to “let everything happen” we discover a presence that is healing and freeing. As we learn to live from this allowing presence, our actions become naturally wholesome and wise.

Three Attitudes that Awaken and Free Our Spirit
Our predicament is intuiting our true nature–love, awareness–and yet regularly contracting into the self-identity conditioned by wants and fears. This talk explores three essential and liberating ways of relating to our human conditioning: forgiving that it arises, interest in what is true, and regarding experience with friendliness and kindness.

Conscious Activity
Based on one of the great legends from the court of King Arthur, this talk examines the freedom that is possible when we can see past the veil of illusion and realize the true nature that shines through all beings.

The Blessings of Soul Recognition
One understanding of suffering is that as individuals and a culture we are uprooted, that we have disconnected from our natural world, our inner life and a sense of belonging with each other. Some flags are speediness and over consumption, anxiety and depression. This talk explores how we have become uprooted and the three gateways of rediscovering our natural wholeness, spontaneity and inner freedom.
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