Dharma Sunday

On this hybrid Dharma Sunday, join Lama Liz for the seventh installation of the Forest Teachings, a series of Dharma talks inspired through exploring how the energies of the living world invite us into deep renewal, transformation, and reconnection with the more that we are and always have been. On this Sunday, we will explore how relaxation and non-separation can be understood as two sides of the same movement. We will ask ourselves: What would it mean to move through the world without continually tightening around the idea of being a separate self? When we look closely, there is a great deal of effort involved in maintaining the sense that I am here and the world is out there. I am the one who is experiencing, and everything else is what I am experiencing. I am the one who sees, and there is something outside me that is seen. I am the one who hears, and there is something outside me that is heard. When we are contracted around separation, appearances can seem heavy and solid and somehow outside us. But when that contraction relaxes, something about their nature can begin to shimmer. There is a kind of radiance that becomes available when we are not continually stepping back from experience and turning it into something we have to understand, control, or defend ourselves against. Together we will ask what would happen if the shimmer of luminosity we recognize in awareness could begin to move through us freely—like a river of rushing sensation, flowing through the body, flowing through perception, flowing through love, and pouring itself out into the world? These are not questions we have to answer – they are questions to live.

At first, thoughts are like a river running in a gorge. In the middle, thoughts are like the steady flow of the river Ganges. Finally, like all rivers they are of one taste in the ocean, Rest in the meeting of the mother and child luminosity.                                — Shabkar Harnessing the powerful energy of our thoughts can feel impossible when we first recognize it.  As Shabkar kindly illustrates for us, “At first, thoughts are like a river running in a gorge.” But instead of clinging to our thoughts, blind to their essence, we can learn through personal experience that they are simply manifestations of our basic nature. Our intrinsic awareness. Unrecognized at first, the mind surges with thoughts. We may even want to turn away from this cascade as our attention expands to include it. Yet it is more difficult to keep this samsaric attitude alive—the habit of perpetuating dualistic clinging—than to simply rest in what is!  It is more difficult to keep longing for what isn’t present. As we can discover for ourselves, already amid the noticing of this turbulent river of thoughts the mind begins to calm. How wonderful to share together as we dive this Dharma Sunday morning into the great yogi Shabkar’s verse on the nature of thoughts!

Join Lama Willa Baker and the online sangha of Natural Dharma Fellowship for a morning of teaching, prayer, contemplation, meditation practice, and community. Not by the book, Willa’s Dharma Sundays reflect what is most immediately and spontaneously on her heartmind. Time is allotted at the end of every Sunday session for audience participation, questions and reflections. Bring your curiosity, questions and insights.

The Buddha invites us to become intimate with the teachings of trees. In this talk, we’ll explore stories from the early Buddhist suttas that reveal trees as steady companions and teachers along the path of awakening.

Stupas are said to be a “support for enlightened mind”. How does this work? What goes into making a stupa, and why is that important for us as practitioners? Stupas are powerful sources of support on many levels. Central to understanding why stupas are beneficial is an outlook on our practice that includes the interplay between the inner elements of our body-mind and the outer elements of appearances and other beings. Understanding how to bridge and dance between the inner and outer, we can access connate awareness and celebrate it with others. We will explore this interplay with a guided practice, and then explore how it relates to the design, construction, and activity of stupas.

The 21 Semdzin are a series of practices found in the Dzogchen Upadesha tantras, using visualization, sonification, and embodiment to release effort and rest in non-meditation. Originally found in the “Reverberation of Sound” and the “Union of the Sun and Moon” tantras of the Upadesha class of Dzogchen, the 21 Semdzin were codified by Longchenpa in the 14th Century. Each semdzin, “lit. holding the mind” is a practice of using light, sound, and embodiment to release grasping and rest in unfabricated presence. This is the second part of a two-part series. Listen to part-one.

In Heart Advice for Practitioners, Patrul Rinpoche advises: “Whether you practice the Dharma of sūtra, tantra, terma, or pure vision, train in every part, from beginning to the end, until you achieve confidence.” But what is the kind of confidence that arises through Dharma practice? Is confidence the same as certainty? Does it come from accumulating information or receiving teachings? Yukhok Chatralwa Chöying Rangdrol writes that, through “training in the power of recognition,” we can come to a “deep-seated, heartfelt confidence.” In this Dharma Sunday, Camille and Shemaleiah will explore what it may mean to cultivate this heartfelt confidence for ourselves. What is the difference between information and knowingness? How do we move from ideas about the view toward realizing it? What does it mean to be honest and authentic? What keeps us on the path? Where do we direct our devotion? What would it be like to stop trying to attain something outside ourselves and instead belong to what is already here? Perhaps we may discover that heartfelt confidence is not based on having answers, but on being open to the questions. We hope you will join us for this exploration.

This class combines body-oriented meditation practice with a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lesson, the brilliant sensory-motor approach to gently and wisely re-educating the neuro-muscular system. Alternating meditation, a Feldenkrais movement lesson and discussion will allow the techniques to complement and empower each other and to enhance mind-body connections and general well-being. Many new and long-time meditators discover that Feldenkrais practices can help them feel greater physical ease and less pain, both in meditation and in everyday activities, by freeing up habitual patterns embedded in the neuromuscular system. For this program, you will need a place to lie down and a chair to sit on. A resource handout will also be available for participants.

If you had the opportunity to devote 6 months, full time, to teaching a Dharma-inspired program for 25 special forces soldiers who might someday be in a position to start – or stop – the next world war, what would you teach them? Join Joel & Michelle Levey as they share practices and insights from their new book, A MANUAL FOR THE AWAKENING WARRIOR, revealing a glimpse of their historic, once-secret, Mind-Body-Spirit training program for the U.S. Army Green Berets, supported by Kalu Rinpoche and many other Dharma teachers. 

This talk highlights the Buddha’s teaching about harm doing—how to understand it and relate to wisely it in our own life and Buddhist practice. In what ways do we minimize the harm we have done, or exaggerate it? In what ways do  we confuse our own distress as others’, or vice versa? In this talk we will cover what the Buddha offered as wisdom in relation to harmdoing, recovery from harm being done to, or by, us and adjustments we can make in our perspectives to have more confidence that our future actions will be harmless to life. We will specifically explore how the perfections of character (Paramitas) can be seen as corrections to our tendencies towards harm-doing.