Talks: Reflections on the Path
Remembering Our Belonging – Part 2
Our deepest suffering comes from feelings of separation, and as a species, our great task is realizing our belonging—to our bodies and hearts, to each other, to the living web of all beings, to formless loving awareness. These two talks explore how healing and true belonging...
Remembering Our Belonging – Part 1
Our deepest suffering comes from feelings of separation, and as a species, our great task is realizing our belonging—to our bodies and hearts, to each other, to the living web of all beings, to formless loving awareness. These two talks explore how healing and true belonging...
Authentic Thanks Giving
How do we awaken our natural capacities for gratitude and generosity? This talk explores the pathways of honest presence and purposeful cultivation, and offers several reflections that guide us in contacting and expressing our love (a favorite Thanksgiving talk re-mastered from...
The Stories that Empower Us: A Conversation with Tara Brach and Elizabeth Lesser, Author of “Cassandra Speaks”
This rich dialogue focuses on how the stories that shape our lives are based on male-generated origin tales and hero myths. If we are to create the world we believe in—a world based on love, compassion and respect for the dignity of all beings—we need to be guided by new...
“Play a Greater Part” – Bodhisattva for Our Times
“Play a Greater Part” – Bodhisattva for Our Times - During scary and uncertain times, the habitual reflex is to try to find ground by creating stories about what’s happening and hardening into us-them blame. This only perpetuates the aggression and violence that is so prevalent...
Our Refuge of Heartspace
Amidst the great emotional reactivity of our times, this talk looks at: How do we hold this? What will allow us to respond wisely to our hurting world? How can we widen the circles of compassion? Our time includes a talk, sharing of responses to several inquiries and a period...
Change, Loss and Timeless Love – Part 2 (Retreat Talk)
Our capacity to live and love fully is entirely intertwined with how we relate to change and loss. These two talks are an invitation to look honestly, and without judgment, at the ways, we resist facing our fears and grieving our losses. We then explore how to bring mindfulness...
Healing Racialized Trauma: A Conversation with Resmaa Menakem and Tara Brach
The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. Resmaa Menakem speaks in a compelling way how this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish...
Change, Loss and Timeless Love (Part 1)
Our capacity to live and love fully is entirely intertwined with how we relate to change and loss. These two talks are an invitation to look honestly, and without judgment, at the ways, we resist facing our fears and grieving our losses. We then explore how to bring mindfulness...
Your Future Self: Turning Towards Your Awakened HeartMind
Our lives are shaped by our evolutionary past – the fears and wants that arise from a separate self sense – and the pull of our evolutionary potential – our awakened heart and mind. This talk explores the power of these pulls, and the teachings and reflections that make us most...
Equanimity: The Gifts of Non-Reactive Mindful Presence
If we want to bring our intelligence, creativity and love into our relationships and world, we need to be able to access an inner refuge of presence. This talk explores how, when we’re reacting from anger, clinging or fear, to pause, reconnect to the immediate experience...
Freedom from the Prison of Limiting Beliefs
We suffer when we are caught in beliefs of our own or other's badness, unworthiness, or lack of value. These beliefs hurt our bodies, lead to violent and/or addictive behaviors, and separate us from our own heart and each other. This talk explores how we can discover who we are...
The Four Remembrances
When we attune to the reality of impermanence and death, we remember what most matters to us. But in daily life we can lose precious swaths of time in a reactive trance, on our way somewhere else, and lost in problem solving, judgment and worry. This talk reflects on four...
Awakening from the Trance of Bad-Othering
Great spiritual leaders of social movements teach that true transformation arises from realizing our interconnectedness, and the light of the divine in each being. Sadly, through human history, much suffering has come from perceiving others as bad-others, flawed humans who are...
Transforming Your Relationship with Anxiety
Strong anxiety frequently triggers fight-flight-freeze, our survival brain’s strategy for dealing with threats. This can become a trance that dominates our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and deepest experience of who we are. This talk explores how we get caught in this reactive...
Worrier Pose: Finding Freedom from the Body of Fear (retreat talk)
While fear is a natural part of our make up, many of us suffering when the “on” button gets jammed. This talk looks at how our fears generate habitual patterns of physical tension, anxious thinking, emotions and behaviors; and how this constellation prevents us from inhabiting...
Radical Love: Part 2 – Loving Ourselves into Healing
Radical love sees and cherishes the sacred that lives through all beings. In this talk, we’ll look at the barrier to loving the life that is right here—what we call self—and how we can call on the light and warmth of awareness to awaken that love. “Love takes off the masks...
Learning to Respond, Not React
When stressed, we often react with looping fear-thoughts, feelings and behaviors that cause harm to ourselves and/or others. This talk offers three interrelated strategies that can serve us when we’re triggered by stress, and help us find our way back to our natural wisdom,...
Radical Love: Part 1 – Reflections that Awaken our Heart
Radical love arises from the purity of our awake awareness, and cuts through the delusion of being separate and not OK. It comes from and brings out our intrinsic goodness. These talks explore the barriers to this embodied, inclusive and active loving, and include...
Your Awake Heart is Calling You
As individuals and societies, we are pulled by both the insecurity of our evolutionary past, and by our awake heart, our capacity for mindfulness and compassion. This talk explores the ways we can listen to and respond to the call of our awake heart, by training ourselves to...
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