Moving from body to choiceless attention to awarenenss of awareness, we consider the Bahiya Sutta and how it points to the not-self nature of things.

Drawing from the Culasunyatta Sutta and the teaching to Bahiya, this talk explores how the entire Buddhist path unfolds within the immediacy of our sensory experience. Emptiness is revealed not as a metaphysical abstraction but as the progressive letting go of what distracts us from what is peaceful—a movement from palace to forest to space to freedom itself. The whole world exists within this fathom-long body and its six sense doors. Liberation happens here, in the seen, heard, sensed, and cognized—not through traveling to some distant realm, but through radical presence with what is. When we meet each moment of contact with the quality of spiritual friendship, recognizing the loving awareness we already are, even the difficult journey over open ocean becomes workable. We learn to fly between the lives we have and the lives we imagine, without the extra burden of complaint, held by the spaciousness of mind itself.

Teachings and Guidance on RAIN meditation.

What if aging, illness, and death aren't enemies to avoid, but teachers bowing at our feet? This talk explores the Buddha's radical invitation to turn toward life's inevitable difficulties—not with morbidity, but with the clear-eyed realism that sets us free. Through poetry, contemporary dharma voices, and the ancient practice of death awareness, we discover how contemplating our mortality doesn't diminish joy—it ignites it. When we stop living heedlessly and wake up to the preciousness of this breath, this moment, this life, we find the courage to love completely and let go gracefully. A New Year's reflection on endings, beginnings, and the alchemy that transforms suffering into compassion.

Teachings and guided meditation on mindfulness of the body using sensations, sounds, and breath.

Teachings and guided meditation on receiving care.

Reflections on Solstice, How to Meditate, Wise Attitude, and guided RAIN practice

A Winter Solstice reflection on faith (saddha) as heartfelt confidence rather than blind belief. Drawing on personal stories of religious transitions and crisis, this talk explores how suffering can become the ground for genuine spiritual trust—the kind that arises from direct experience and opens us to the possibility of awakening exactly as we are. Through poetry, Buddhist teachings, and the paradox of being already free while still practicing, we examine how verified faith allows us to meet life with both acceptance and wise action.

Guided meditation on Caring Figure practice and receiving unconditional love.

We continue with the exploration opened up last week in our examination of "skillful desire," starting again with the common misunderstanding of the Buddha's teachings as suggesting giving up all wanting of the pleasant and all not wanting of the unpleasant. There are, to be sure, some passages in the teachings which seem to suggest this approach; here is one example, from the Sallatha Sutta about the results of practice: “Desirable things don't charm the mind, undesirable ones bring no resistance." In the talk, we first review the nature of skillful desire and the distinction between skillful and unskillful desire. A starting reference point is the understanding of the sequence from contact to grasping in the teaching on Dependent Origination and. We look again at the Buddha's teachings on chanda or "skillful desire" and the importance of experiences of pleasure, joy, and happiness in different practice contexts. We then look in a similar way at skillful aversion, asking about the distinction between skillful and unskillful aversion, and pointing especially to the importance of inquiry into the experience of aversion; we look with some detail into the experience of anger. Finally, we connect our explorations with the experience of darkness and light at the time of the Winter Solstice, four days from now.

We start with settling for about 8 minutes followed by about the same time with basic mindfulness practice. Then we explore "moderate" experiences of pleasant or unpleasant when they occur, whether a bodily experience, an emotion, or a thought (or a mix), experiencing pleasant or unpleasant and seeing whether there follows wanting (or not wanting) and reactivity (habitual grasping or pushing away). We close with some reflection on what we explored, with an emphasis on skillful aversion: Was some of the not wanting skillful? Unskillful? What do we find in some daily life examples of aversion? This exploration is related to the talk given a short time later.

A look at how Equanimity can be applied to oneself, help in our relationships and support active engagement in a troubled world.

The spacious field of awareness has the capacity to know any experience without reactivity. Through connecting with a mind that is vast like the sky, we can see all objects arising and passing without entanglement.

This talk explores vedanā within the framework of dependent origination, highlighting the role it plays in shaping habitual reactivity and suffering. It shows how mindfulness of feeling tone reveals the moment where suffering is conditioned—and where freedom becomes possible. By learning to meet vedanā directly, we cultivate equanimity and the capacity to relate to all experience with balance and ease.

An overview of the importance of cultivating Mudita or happiness at the happiness of others with instructions for practicing with various categories.

Morning instructions of expanding the field of awareness to include the attitude of mind as well as working with thoughts and emotions