What I most love in my teaching practice is seeing students become dedicated to their own liberation. As their spiritual practice matures, people light up from within when they begin to understand that personal freedom is possible. This commitment to freedom on the part of the student inspires me to find ways to express my deepest understanding and enthusiasm for liberation.
The mindfulness teachings of the Buddha are among the more direct, practical meditation techiques that we can cultivate. My focus is on sharing these practices in an accessable, down-to-earth way. How can we disengage from our habits of responding to the world through veils of confusion, greed, and hatred?
Mindfulness practice helps us recognize when we are responding to the world from the mental and emotional habits that obscure our true home, our radiant nature, which manifests as compassion and love. The Buddha's teachings show us that we are not isolated individuals who need to live defensive lives. Rather, we can learn to trust and live from our full potential as compassionate members of a connected planet.
Emptiness and compassion are like two sides of the same coin -- they support and balance one another. How can we open to the beauty and suffering in this world; and how can we respond with wise intention?
This talk encourages us to explore the gratification, danger and escape in our personal experience of clinging; with the intention to understand rather than to judge.
Meeting our experience with mindfulness/wisdom is the practice of non-clinging.
The Buddha gave great importance to the quality of generosity, or dana. It can be seen as a supportive condition for the cultivation of the eightfold path. The inner intention of generosity purifies the heart/mind of greed - and it brings great joy!
The Buddha said that the perception of impermanence, when developed and cultivated, can lead to liberation. This talk explores some of the ways we can begin and continue to perceive this truth more accurately.
Meditation is the work of the mind: as in the famous saying of the Buddha: Avoid evil, do good and purify the mind. The attitude with which we approach our practice can be a continuation of our usual habits of getting and doing, or we can shift the view (the paradigm) to that of trust and confidence in natural awareness.
The Dalai Lama once said that all of our problems stem from mistaken perception. That is why there is so much emphasis on true knowledge.
This talk explores the quality factor of perception, and how when it is colored by unwholesome states of mind we cannot accurately recognize reality, and so respond in ways that only increase our confusion.
This talk describes how the journey of our life and practice is to mingle our hearts and minds fully with the Dharma. The eight-fold path is the descriptive template we can use; this talk focuses particularly on wise view and wise intention, the first two steps.
