The Wright Show
Recorded: Dec 29 Posted: Jan 19, 2014
Robert Wright (Bloggingheads.tv) and Joseph Goldstein (Insight Meditation Society, Mindfulness)
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The Awakening the Dreamer Symposium awakens future game changers to the need for, and opportunity of, bringing forth a new future for everyone. The half-day program with skilled facilitators takes place in-person around the United States and in 77 other countries, and is also available via video that can be watched at your convenience. In this workshop, you will have the opportunity to take a stand for the sustainable, just, and fulfilling future you want to see.
Wake up to your own role in creating a new future. This new perspective of the current state of our planet features top scientific, indigenous and activist minds from around the world. Now available for the first-time ever on video, The Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream Symposium empowers participants to respond to the urgency and the opportunity of our times with action and informed, grounded optimism. Taped live, the Symposium features leading-edge information, inspiring multimedia and transformative exercises for an experience like none other. Together, we can change the world.
Worksheets: Personal Plan for Getting Into Action / Declaration Card
Robin Courtin - Awakening our Hearts in the World - Part 1 of 2
Submitted by Darren Dyke on Sat, 11/16/2013
In this special podcast, Ven. Robina Courtin discusses how to engage our practice without surrendering to anger or clinging to "right and wrong". We were thrilled to host this global activist, renowned teacher, and Tibetan nun for her second visit to The Interdependence Project in September 2012.
Ven. Robina returns to IDP on December 11, 2013. Details and tickets are available at this link. The talk will be podcasted for our remote listeners.
Robina Courtin was born in Melbourne, Australia, and brought up as a Catholic. Since 1977, she has lived as a Buddhist nun in the Tibetan tradition, traveling, teaching, and bringing the Dharma to people around the world, including prisoners via The Liberation Prison Project, which she founded. More information and schedule: http://robinacourtin.com/
This podcast is provided by the generosity of listeners like you. Become a Member or make a contribution to support this and other initiatives by The Interdependence Project.
You may subscribe to IDP's podcasts at this link or via iTunes at this link.
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Robin Courtin - Awakening our Hearts in the World - Part 2 of 2
In this special podcast, Ven. Robina Courtin, discusses how to engage our practice without surrendering to anger or clinging to "right and wrong". We were thrilled to host this global activist, renowned teacher, and Tibetan nun for her second visit to The Interdependence Project in September 2012.
Ven. Robina returns to IDP on December 11, 2013. Details and tickets are available at this link. The talk will be podcasted for our remote listeners.
Robina Courtin was born in Melbourne, Australia, and brought up as a Catholic. Since 1977, she has lived as a Buddhist nun in the Tibetan tradition, traveling, teaching, and bringing the Dharma to people around the world, including prisoners via The Liberation Prison Project, which she founded. More information and schedule: http://robinacourtin.com/
This podcast is provided by the generosity of listeners like you. Become a Member or make a contribution to support this and other initiatives by The Interdependence Project.
You may subscribe to IDP's podcasts at this link or via iTunes at this link.
Audio File Download (right-click and "Save Link As...")
Richard Mendius, M.D., is a board certified neurologist in private practice in Marin County, California. He graduated from Stanford University, then attended medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received his M.D. in 1977. He trained in neurology at the Wadsworth VA Medical Center in Los Angeles under the direction of Dr. W. W. Tourtellotte, then did fellowship training in clinical electroencephalography and clinical epilepsy under Dr. Jerome Engel at UCLA Medical Center. He also did simultaneous training in neurobehavior under Drs. Frank Benson and Jeff Cummings. He has held faculty positions at UCLA School of Medicine, Oregon Health & Science University, and Stanford University School of Medicine. During his teaching career, he received the OHSU Silver Hammer award and the Stanford University Lysia Forno award for teaching excellence.
Dr. Mendius has a subspecialty in the neurobiology and practice of meditation. His meditation practice began in Los Angeles, with training from Shinzen Young in the 1980s. Since moving to Marin County, he has made Spirit Rock his home base and has taught classes and participated in retreats with Jack Kornfield, among others.
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Rick Hanson, PhD began meditating in 1974 and has practiced in several traditions. A neuropsychologist, writer, and teacher, he co-founded the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom (see www.WiseBrain.org) and edits the Wise Brain Bulletin. First author of Mother Nurture (Penguin, 2002), he has authored the books Buddha's Brain and Just One Thing. He started sitting at Spirit Rock in 1993 and served a nine-year term on its Board. A graduate of the Community Dharma Leader training program, he leads a weekly meditation group in San Rafael.
Rick Hanson - The Neurology of Awakening (with Rick Mendius): Part 1, Overview & Practice
50:40 | 2013-03-16
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The latest brain research has begun to confirm the central insights of the Buddha and other great teachers. And it’s suggesting ways you can help your brain to enter deeper states of mindfulness, quiet, and concentration. Suffering, joy, and freedom all depend on what happens within your nervous system. Skillful practice thus means being skillful with your own brain. This experiential workshop will offer user-friendly information with lots of practical methods. No background in neuroscience or mindfulness is needed, though teaching are also appropriate for health care professionals.
We’ll cover:
- Implications from brain research for steadying the mind... quieting it... and bringing it to singleness
- The brain during the jhanas or other states of deep concentration
- How to help lay the neurological foundation for liberating insight
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The Neurology of Awakening (with Rick Mendius): Part 2
Rick Hanson
1:49:29 | 2013-03-16
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The Neurology of Awakening (with Rick Mendius): Part 3
Rick Hanson
1:14:34 | 2013-03-16
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The Neurology of Awakening (with Rick Mendius): Part 4
Rick Hanson
1:21:27 | 2013-03-16
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This is Your Brain on Sex and Religion: Experiments in Neuroscience
December 6th, 2011
Female Brain Orgasm Video
If you attended the recent Society for Neuroscience conference, you had the chance to see some unprecedented 3D imaging of the brain — images that showed the exact order in which women’s brain regions (80 in total) are activated in the sequence leading to an orgasm. For Barry Komisaruk (professor of psychology at Rutgers University), this imaging isn’t gratuitous. The whole point is to demystify how the brain experiences pleasure, something that could eventually inform our understanding of addiction and depression. Komisaruk said:
It’s a beautiful system in which to study the brain’s connectivity. We expect that this movie [above], a dynamic representation of the gradual buildup of brain activity to a climax, followed by resolution, will facilitate our understanding of pathological conditions such as anorgasmia by emphasizing where in the brain the sequential process breaks down.
Meanwhile, back at the neuroscience ranch, researchers are also using imaging technology to observe the human brain in another state, the state where people experience mystical awakenings during prayer and meditation or other spiritual epiphanies. Scientific American took a fairly deep look at this cutting-edge field several years ago (read the full piece here), and now NPR has produced a multimedia glimpse into the evolving science of spirituality. The presentation (click here or the image above) combines audio, video, articles, book excerpts, etc. and delves into the fundamental question: Is God a delusion created by brain chemistry, or is brain chemistry a necessary conduit for people to reach God?
If you want to learn more about the brain and neuroscience, don’t miss the courses listed in the Psychology/Neuroscience section of our big collection of Free Online Courses.
Time and The Guardian have more on the first story above here and here.
Pema Chödrön - Coming Closer to Ourselves - Making Everything the Path of AwakeningPema Chödrön: Just Be Curious
The magic of Pema Chödrön—and what makes her such an exceptional teacher—is how she can take a subject that could be heady or conceptual and teach it in a way that makes it sink directly into the heart of her listener. Sounds True producer Mitchell Clute says that this selection from Pema’s audio program Coming Closer to Ourselves is a perfect example. Here Pema talks about Tibetan Buddhism’s five skandhas—the mental and physical characteristics that create and sustain the ego—and offers a simple lesson. If we start by being playfully curious, she teaches, we can find the gaps in our own preconceptions and thoughts—and by following that thread of curiosity, we can let go of our attachments and discover who we truly are.
More from Pema Chödrön
Jeff Foster offers an alternative perspective on addiction. He suggests that all human beings are 'addicts' to some extent - we are all trying to escape or distract ourselves from the present moment in various ways - through drugs, through shopping, through alcohol, through work, even through spirituality - seeking contentment outside of ourselves, seeking wholeness in the future. What goes to the core of all our addictions is our addiction to "me", our misidentification as a separate wave in the vast ocean of life, and the ensuing search for That which we already are. Addiction is a war with the present moment, and discovering deep acceptance - the acceptance that you are in your essence - is where this war can end. We simply stop seeking contentment outside of ourselves.... Jeff's new book The Deepest Acceptance: Radical Awakening in Ordinary Life is published by Sounds True.
For more:http://www.lifewithoutacentre.comHere is the publisher's information about the book (from Amazon.com):
How can we bring an effortless yes to this moment? How do we stop running from "the mess of life"-our predicaments, our frustrations, even our search for liberation-and start flowing with all of it?
In small venues throughout the UK and Europe, a young teacher named Jeff Foster is quietly awakening a new generation of spiritual inquirers to the experience of abiding presence and peace in our ever-shifting world. His informal gatherings, blogs, and "kitchen-table video posts" have created a rising tide of interest in his teachings.
With The Deepest Acceptance, Jeff Foster invites us to discover the ocean of who we are: an awareness that has already allowed every wave of emotion and experience to arrive.
While Jeff delightfully admits the irony of writing a book to convey something that is beyond words to teach, here he confirms his ability to guide us in unexpected new ways to a space of absolute acceptance and joy, no matter what's happening in our lives.
Candid, thoughtful, humorous-and deeply compassionate toward those searching for a way out of suffering-this refreshing new luminary inspires us to stop trying to "do" acceptance . and start falling in love with "what has already been allowed."
Jeff Foster writes and speaks from his own awakened experience to help show the way out of seeking fulfillment in the future and into the acceptance of "all this, here and now." He studied astrophysics at Cambridge University. Following a period of depression and physical illness, he embarked on an intensive spiritual search that came to an end with the discovery that life itself was what he had always been seeking.
"Just as the ocean accepts every wave, so too has our awareness already allowed and accepted what is here."-Jeff Foster
Jeff Foster studied Astrophysics at Cambridge University. In his mid-twenties, after a long period of depression and illness, he became addicted to the idea of ‘spiritual enlightenment’ and embarked on an intensive spiritual quest for the ultimate truth of existence.Enjoy the podcast.
The spiritual search came crashing down with the clear recognition of the non-dual nature of everything, and the discovery of the extraordinary in the ordinary. In the clarity of this seeing, life became what it always was: intimate, open, loving and spontaneous, and Jeff was left with a deep understanding of the root illusion behind all human suffering, and a love of the present moment.
The Deepest Acceptance
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Tami Simon speaks with Jeff Foster, voted in 2012 by The Watkins Review as one of the world’s 100 most spiritually influential people living today. With Sounds True, Jeff has released a new book, The Deepest Acceptance: Radical Awakening in Ordinary Life, and an accompanying audio program inviting us to discover the ocean of who we are: an awareness that has already allowed every wave of emotion and experience to arrive. In this episode, Jeff explains that we are acceptance, how to work with practical concerns such as financial fears, and the power of being with someone who is suffering—with an absolutely open embrace. Jeff also talks about his own path of awakening, including deep depression and some of his most important discoveries. (90 minutes)
Developing an attitude towards meditation, by Ajahn Sumedho
Posted on 19 October 2012 by Buddhism NowWhen one composes one’s mind and looks inwards, there is a sense of coming to one point. If we are not caught in the thinking process, we can be aware of the here and now, the body, the breath, mental states, moods; we can allow everything to be what it is.
The attitude of many people in meditation is that there is always a need to change something. There might be an attempt to attain a particular state or some kind of blissful experience they have had before, or even if they haven’t had anything like that, they might hope that if they continue to practise, they will. When we practise meditation with this idea of getting something, then even the idea of practice, even the word ‘meditation’, can bring up this conditioned reaction of: ‘There’s something I’ve got to do. If I’m in a bad mood I should get rid of that mood. I’ve got to concentrate my mind.’ If the mind’s scattered and we’re all over the place, ‘I should make it one-pointed; I’ve got to concentrate.’ And so we make meditation into hard work and there is a great deal of failure in it because we’re trying to control everything through these ideas. But this is an impossibility.
The idea of going off to a cave somewhere to meditate, or of being alone, is very attractive because as you settle into solitude, you do experience a level of tranquillity through lack of sensory stimulation. It is a kind of sensory deprivation. But that kind of tranquillity is easily disturbed. When the sensory impingements start pounding away at you again, you can get into, ‘Let me go to my cave.’ You can begin to hate people. You see them always as a threat. ‘Here they come again. They’re going to disrupt my samadhi.’ So, this couldn’t possibly be the way to liberation.
The other extreme is to think that you should not go off to the cave and should not practise meditation. Sometimes you hear people say that one need only be natural and let everything happen. This is true if you can do it, but if you don’t even know what is natural yet, it’s difficult to trust yourself.
The word ‘meditation’ covers many different kinds of mental experiences. The goal of Buddhist meditation is to see things as they are; it is a state of awakened attention. This is a very simple thing to do; it isn’t complicated or difficult or something that takes years to achieve. It is so easy that you don’t even notice it. When you say, ‘You’ve got to practise meditation,’ you conceive it as something you have to attain—you have to subdue your defilements, control your emotions and develop virtues in order to attain some kind of ideal state of mind. It sounds very remote and far from what we can expect in our lives as human beings.
Then you might have these images of what meditators do. Perhaps you think of yogis sitting in remote places, on mountain tops or in caves. Even the Buddha-image can convey this sense of remoteness and separation if you don’t understand how to use that particular icon.
So, in developing an attitude towards meditation, towards formal practice or daily life practice, we might separate the two. In formal practice or controlled retreats everything is organised, we all go by the routine, by the structure. Then, when we get up from that, we might feel that that is not meditation, and we leave it. Then we can refer to ‘daily life meditation’, and that seems hopeless. If we compare daily life with a very controlled meditation retreat they are very different. You can’t however live your life in that controlled structure as an ongoing experience. Geshe Tashi [Tsering] made the point very well in his talk last night that this is a real challenge. How do you develop this attention, this awakened-ness in the flow of life? That doesn’t remove the option of going on retreat or diminish the value of retreats in any way, but it is a way of looking at meditation as awakened-ness and awareness, mindfulness, so that it actually is something you develop throughout your daily life in whatever way you have to live it, in whatever conditions. There is a sense of allowing things to be. In this present moment you can allow your body to be in whatever way it is right now, as well as your emotional state or mental state. You can be just the observer. Right now the mood is like this, I feel like this. Just observe it; just be aware of it. Is there confusion, indifference, happiness, sadness, doubt or uncertainty? Whatever is present, allow it to be what it is.
Try looking inwards with this attitude of observing whatever is present. It can be something very precise, like anger, or something very sharp. A lot of our emotions, however, are nebulous, kind of amorphous, wandering things. So now put yourself in this position of the Buddha, Buddho, the knower—not the judge—and just look. Just notice what kind of mood or feeling you are in.
When we start really noticing, really listening or paying attention, sustaining an awareness on just this mood or mental state (and we’re not used to doing this), then we may become aware of bodily tensions or feelings of bewilderment, of not knowing quite what we’re supposed to be doing, what we’re supposed to find. Now, be aware of this as a mental object. What we are doing is putting ourselves increasingly in this position of Buddha, the Buddho. Then your emotional state is seen in an objective way; it is like this. ‘What am I supposed to be doing?’—This can be seen as a mental object.
Another suggestion is to relax into the present. You have this idea of what you have to do, and you put yourself into a state of tension through too much effort. It’s not a matter of trying too hard or not trying at all, but of just the right amount of attention needed to just listen, to just be open to this present moment in a relaxed way. If we force it, if we try too hard, then we tend to contract; we don’t relax. Then again, if I say ‘relax’, you might take that as meaning ‘lax’, so then you just fall asleep—those who are sitting on the floor decide to lie down, then they go to sleep. Or one could take ‘relax’ as an attitude of just letting go, an attitude of not having to do anything or get anything. This is not a kind of gaining situation. You are not here to get something or achieve something, so it’s not like a worldly thing. You are not here to get your samadhi or prove something. What accompanies that might well be the fear that you won’t be able to do it, ‘Maybe I’m one of those people that will never get enlightened.’ Another one we all sometimes revert to is, ‘I don’t expect to get enlightened in this lifetime. I just don’t have what it takes.’ Well, don’t believe that one either.
Ajahn Chah used to call meditation a holiday for the heart. We have a tendency to think that meditation is something we’ve got to achieve, another thing we‘ve got to do and get, but Ajahn Chah would put it in terms of a holiday. Try that, try seeing meditation in that way.
More articles by Ajahn Sumedho here[The above is from a talk given by him on 31 July 2001 at the Buddhist Publishing Group, Buddhist Summer School, England.]
Peter Levine: Healing Trauma
According to several Buddhist and Taoist traditions, sex, meditation, death, and trauma share a common potential. These are the great portals—catalysts for profound surrender and awakening. Unfortunately, most of us are not prepared to take the opportunities offered by these powerful teachers.
Let’s take a look at sex first. Though many of us have experienced glimpses of sexual ecstasy, the focus on titillation, seduction, and performance in post-Viagra America often obscure the possibility for deep emotional and spiritual surrender that sex can offer.
Meditation is another avenue to awakening, but because of the years of dedication required to achieve what many of the great traditions refer to as “ego-death” through meditative practice, very few people have succeeded using this method.
The process of dying, a final chance to make peace with ourselves, has been given over largely to doctors, drugs, and machines. Even in supportive and conscious settings, what should be a spiritual act of surrender at the time of death is too often overshadowed by the sad remorse that the surrender did not occur earlier in life.
Trauma is the fourth pathway to awakening. In transforming and releasing ourselves from trauma, we must face, as does the newborn child, an uncertain world. It is a world stripped of the illusion of safety, and it obliges us to learn an entirely new way of being. When we enter it, we soon discover that our instinctive energies are not limited to acts of flight or uncontrolled violence. They are our heroic energies. And they can be harnessed! The energies that are released when we heal from trauma are the wellspring of our creative, artistic, and poetic sensibilities, and they can be summoned to propel us into the wholeness of our intelligence.
Trauma is about thwarted instincts. Instincts, by definition, are always in the present. When we allow them their rightful domain, we surrender to the “eternal now.” With the full presence of mind and body, we can gain access to the source of our own energy and enthusiasm. Consider for a moment the word enthusiasm. It comes from the Greek words en, meaning within, and Theos, meaning God. When we reclaim our enthusiasm for life, we are drawing closer to God, becoming more spiritual.
As we resolve our traumas, we discover missing parts of our beings, those that make us feel whole and complete. Our instincts house the simple but vital knowledge that “I am I” and “I am here.”
Without this sense of belonging in the world, we are lost, disconnected from life. If we learn how to surrender to our inborn knowledge, it can lead us on a healing journey that will bring us face to face with our natural spirituality, our God-given connection to life.
The process of healing trauma can drop us into virtual birth canals of consciousness. From these vantage points, we can position ourselves to be propelled fully into the stream of life. Healing from trauma can be that final instinctive push, that inner shaking and trembling, “the kick” that can awaken us and lead us on a journey home.
shared by ianmackenzThe practice of yoga is a practice of intimacy. The process of reaching into the physical, psychological and other interdependent sheaths of the postures wakes us up to the intelligence of life.
Through becoming intimate with the breathing patterns, bandhas and stillness of meditative awareness we wake to our lives and realize the possibility of serving others. Yoga Philosophy and practice, juxtaposed with Buddhism and western Psychology gives us the tools for personal healing and social action.
Learn more about Michael Stone
http://www.centreofgravity.org/
"Michael Stone - Awake In the World - On Samskaras and the Bodhisattva Vow" by ianmackenz is licensed under a Creative Commons License
Join thought leaders - practitioners, academics, coaches, consultants and more – who will together explore the frontiers of our knowledge and practices of what it means to be a conscious, integral leader in the 21st century.2012 INTEGRAL LEADERSHIP IN ACTION CONFERENCE
• A Gathering for Integral INQUIRY and ACTION •Evolving Leadership for an Awakening World:
TRANSFORMING LEADERSHIP THROUGH THEORY, ACTION & APPLICATION
May 17 – 20
at the Chaminade Resort & Spa
in Santa Cruz, CAOur most experiential and interactive conference ever!!!
Our program is a tapestry of finely orchestrated large group experiences, small group breakouts, community building, cutting edge media explorations, self-reflection and integral life practice, fellowship and dancing. While each session is revealing in its own way, all of these opportunities are woven together to reveal and nurture integral leadership in ways that are applicable and actionable in service to the world around us.
Here is just a small sample of our AMAZING line-up:
…and that’s just a peek into what is in store for our ever-expanding community of integral seekers.
- Don Beck: pulls back the curtain and reveals the pragmatic side of Spiral Dynamics as a key solution to complex global issues
- Cindy Wigglesworth: facilitates exploration of the good, true, and beautiful bridge between spiritual intelligence and daily integral leadership actions
- Barrett Brown: exposes the inner workings of the world’s foremost integral leaders, making our own aspirations and developmental actions more clear and accessible
- Brett Thomas: coming off his deep-dive learning experience in the Integral Leadership Collaborative, Brett shares even more critical practices and actions toward becoming a more integral leader
- Jeff Salzman: the guru of the integral interpretation of world events, helps to refine our expanded lenses so that we can see more, be more of what the world so desperately needs
- Bert Parlee: invites you on a journey into Integral Optimism, thus helping you find new strength and emotional capacity in our ever-challenging world
- Dana Carmen & Allison Conte: will team with Bert Parlee to lead us into an ecstatic polarities dance – exploring polarities as a useful integral concept and range of practices
- Dean Anderson: shares his decades of in-the-trenches experience as one of the most integrally-informed organizational change practitioners on the planet
ATTENTION: This year’s ILiA Conference is a smaller, more intimate learning community and we are restricted to 70 attendees. Register as soon as is humanly possible.
- We will be inspired to push the edges of our own development and expand our vision of leadership potentiality.
- We will learn from seasoned experts who are practicing and advancing our knowledge of integral leadership.
- We will take away practical tools that we can immediately apply to our lives and work.
- We will encourage everyone to share what is working and what is not in our integral leadership experiences.
- We will commune, share meals together and explore the depths of our collective wisdom.
- We will laugh and play and practice and dance.
- We will return home fully refreshed, invigorated and grounded in a spirit of wellness and love.
The RAPID Action price is $599 and includes:FIRST TO REGISTER, FIRST TO ATTEND.
- Lunches and dinners throughout the conference
- Full use of the beautiful grounds surrounding the Chaminade
- All sessions from May 17 - May 20
- Saturday night party
Like us on Facebook.Registration is open NOW.
Rapid Action discount ends on February 24!!
Click here for registration details.
Enjoy luxurious accommodation at The Chaminade with SPECIAL ILiA room rates.
John Dunne & Beate Stolte: 01-18-12: Awakening to Buddha Nature (Part 1)
Speakers: John Dunne & Beate Stolte
Recorded: Wednesday Jan 18, 2012
Series Description: The continuity between ordinary consciousness and the fully awake state of Buddhahood is called Tathagatagarbha or “Buddha Nature.” What is this “Buddha Nature”, and how can it be actualized in one’s everyday experience? Asking these and other questions, and using various modes of inquiry to do so, we will explore what is essential to the realization of Buddha Nature. We will consider what is already known about this Buddha principle in various traditions, the ways we know, as well as the emotional framework of that knowledge.
During the retreat John Dunne will teach Buddhist Philosophy and the Dharma in his brilliant and humorous way, which makes it easily accessible for western practitioners. This retreat is appropriate for beginners and long-time practitioners. Sensei Beate will lead morning and evening meditation and will give meditation instructions.
John Dunne is an associate professor in the Department of Religion at Emory University, where he is Co-Director of the Encyclopedia of Contemplative Practices and the Emory Collaborative for Contemplative Studies. He was educated at the Amherst College and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. from the Committee on the Study of Religion in 1999. His work focuses on various aspects of Buddhist philosophy and contemplative practice. In Foundations of Dharmakirti’s Philosophy (2004), he examines the most prominent Buddhist theories of perception, language, inference and justification. His current research includes an inquiry into the notion of “mindfulness” in both classical Buddhist and contemporary contexts, and he is also engaged in a study of Candrakirti’s “Prasannapada”, a major Buddhist philosophical work on the metaphysics of “emptiness” and “selflessness.” His recently published work includes an essay on neuroscience and meditation co-authored with Richard J. Davidson and Antoine Lutz. He frequently serves as a translator for Tibetan scholars, and as a consultant, he appears on the roster of several ongoing scientific studies of Buddhist contemplative practices.
Sensei Beate Genko Stolte is a Zen teacher and the first Dharma successor of Roshi Joan Halifax in the lineage of Taizan Maezumi Roshi. Born in Germany, she has practiced Zen for more than 20 years and was priest-ordained in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (“Zen Mind, Beginners Mind”). She has degrees in business administration and fiscal law. She has lived, practiced, and taught in Zen Buddhist communities in the United States, Switzerland and Germany and visited Japan for Zen Buddhist studies. As a co-founder of a German Buddhist Study Center, she served as president of the board for ten years as well as director.
To access the entire series, please click on the link below:
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: All 18 Parts
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: All 18 Parts
Recorded: Sunday Jan 29, 2012
The 18 part series Awakening to Buddha Nature is now published. Also, please note that the Jan 18th dharma talk (episode # 561, titled: Faith and Reason) was an introduction to this series.
You can access the desired part of the series by clicking on its link below:
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: Part 1
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: Part 2
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: Part 3
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: Part 4
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: Part 5
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: Part 6
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: Part 7
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: Part 8
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: Part 9
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: Part 10
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: Part 11
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: Part 12
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: Part 13
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: Part 14a
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: Part 14b
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: Part 15
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: Part 16
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: Part 17
Awakening to Buddha Nature Series: Part 18
Adyashanti: The Inner Revolution of Spiritual Awakening
Adyashanti dares all seekers of peace and freedom to take the possibility of liberation in this life seriously. He began teaching in 1996, at the request of his Zen teacher with whom he had been studying for 14 years. Since then many spiritual seekers have awakened to their true nature while spending time with Adyashanti.
The author of The End of Your World, Emptiness Dancing, and True Meditation, Adyashanti offers spontaneous and direct nondual teachings that have been compared to those of the early Zen masters and Advaita Vedanta sages. However, Adya says, "If you filter my words through any tradition or-ism, you will miss altogether what I am saying. The liberating truth is not static; it is alive. It cannot be put into concepts and be understood by the mind. The truth lies beyond all forms of conceptual fundamentalism. What you are is the beyond -- awake and present, here and now already. I am simply helping you to realize that."
Monday, October 10, 2011
Tami Simon speaks with Dr. Judith Blackstone, a licensed clinical psychotherapist in New York and an innovative teacher in contemporary spirituality. With Sounds True, she has published a book called The Intimate Life: Awakening to the Spiritual Essence in Yourself and Others, and a six-session audio learning course called The Realization Process: A Step-by-Step Guide to Embodied Spiritual Awakening, in which she teaches her powerful method for attuning to fundamental (or non-dual) consciousness. In this episode, Tami has an illuminating conversation with Judith about two introductory ways of tapping into fundamental consciousness, how we can relate to others “core to core,” and the role of the body in the fullness of realization. (53 minutes)Listen Now:
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HBO's 'Enlightened' Take On Modern Meditation
Audio for this story from Fresh Air from WHYY will be available at approx. 5:00 p.m. ET
EnlargeHBO
Laura Dern is Amy Jellicoe, a health and beauty executive who returns from a post-meltdown retreat to pick up the pieces of her broken life in the new HBO series Enlightened.Can people really change? That's the question Laura Dern and Mike White ask in their new HBO series, Enlightened, which premieres Monday night. The show features Dern as Amy Jellicoe, an ambitious executive who has a nervous breakdown at her workplace. She goes to a rehabilitation center in Hawaii, where she experiences an awakening.When Amy returns home, she wants to put her new philosophy into practice — meditating, communicating better with her mother (Diane Ladd), and fostering a healthier relationship with her ex-husband (Luke Wilson). But she finds her lessons of enlightenment being put to the test.Show creator Mike White wrote the series and also directed some of the episodes. White and Dern join Fresh Air's Terry Gross for a conversation about Enlightened.
Interview Highlights
On the difficulties of meditating, and the challenge of creating a TV show about meditation:White: "From my experience, meditating can bring up the most stressful thoughts ... To actually try to stop that constant chatter of, 'I need to do this, I need to do that ... this is what's wrong with me.' I think that's the hardest thing for many people to do, especially in our modern, achievement-oriented [environment].
EnlargePrashant Gupta/HBO
Laura Dern and series creator Mike White, shown together on the set of Enlightened, first worked together on White's 2007 film Year of the Dog."Everyone is running so manic, and what's interesting, too, is when we turned in the show, the more quiet, meditative aspects of the show made HBO the most nervous. Because people, especially in TV, first they want their comedies funny, and they want their dramas juicy and kind of operative, and this is very internal."Especially these moments Amy has when she's going inside and where it slows down a little bit, I think that that's just something in general that makes a network executive worry that you're going to lose your audience, and people are going to click off or change the channel. That's not what people are looking for when they're zoning out in front of the TV."On whether people can really change:White: "I think there are certain ways that people are always themselves, but I do think people change. I feel like that is the hopefulness I think the show tries to get at. ... That's a big question both Laura and I have discussed throughout the entire shooting and writing of the show, you know ... how enlightened is Amy? If she's just a fraud ... and in the end .... hasn't really grown, then I think it is a cynical show. I feel like we're all human and nobody's perfect, and we're all sort of fumbling towards something better. But if we don't believe that we can change or get over ourselves, it's a pretty depressing resolution."Dern: "Mike so beautifully writes about incremental growth, and I think so many film writers want to tackle this enormous growth where this villain becomes a hero in the hour and half that we have with them. In the long form of this season, Mike has this opportunity of Amy having this longing for growth, and longing for some form of self-acceptance ... So there's this complicated and elusive journey toward growth that she takes."On the carefully calibrated tone of the show:White: "When HBO came to me, and when Laura and I started talking about a show together, I liked the idea of somebody who had come to the edge and then wanted to come back and get over themselves. We see the comic, flawed aspects of [Amy's] quest to be enlightened. But at the same time, if it was just a satire, taking her enterprise very cynically, I just think it would be an easy target, and it wouldn't be a show — it would be a skit or something. The tone of the show blends some of the wryness, which I naturally bring to writing stuff ... but also, there's a real sincerity to it."
