2014-04-16 - RAIN - Cultivating a Mindful Presence - The acronym RAIN is a powerful tool for interrupting habitual patterns of emotional reactivity and discovering the freedom of an awake, compassionate presence. This talk explores the components of RAIN, how it works, what makes it transformational and typical challenges people encounter. The teachings include a guided RAIN meditation.
2014-04-16 - Guided Meditation: Breath as Homebase
2014-02-05-Guided Meditation: Metta (Lovingkindness)
2014-04-09 - Loving and Losing - The way that we relate to impermanence and loss shapes our capacity to live and love fully. This talk, drawing on Mary Oliver’s poem “In Blackwater Woods,” explores three elements in our response to this fleeting, precious life that are integral to our healing and freedom.
2014-04-09 - Guided Meditation: Living Presence
2010-08-04 - Guided Meditation - Arriving in Presence
2014-04-02 - Stress and Our Evolving Consciousness - The universal experience of stress (in Buddhism, called dukkha) is a message that we are not realizing, trusting and living from our true nature. Our habitual reactions to stress - grasping, aversion, resistance - deepen emotional pain and lock us in a limiting sense of egoic-self. This talk explores how, with conscious intention and deepened attention, the stressful difficulties we encounter can become the very grounds of healing and spiritua...
2014-04-02 - Guided Meditation: Connecting with Aliveness and Openness
2014-03-26 - Planting Ourselves in the Universe - When we are lost in the trance of thinking, we disconnect from the aliveness, awareness and love that is our source. Mindfulness, a key capacity of our evolving consciousness, awakens us from an identification with thinking and enables us to inhabit a wider realm of Being. This talk explores the confines of conceptual mind and the simple yet powerful practices that cultivate mindful awareness.
2014-03-26 - Guided Meditation: Relaxing into Presence
2014-03-19 - Return of the Prodigal Son - Drawing on Henri Nouwen’s book that interprets this famous parable, this talk looks at the ways we cut off from loving awareness, and the process of homecoming. Our inquiry, reflections and a guided meditation focus on an essential and often overlooked element of transformation: our capacity to trust in love, to let love in.
2014-03-19 - Guided Meditation: Letting Life Live Through You
2014-03-12 - Part 5 - Equanimity - A Heart that is Ready for Anything - Equanimity is the quality of presence that is open, balanced and non-reactive. As this talk explores, when equanimity is lacking, we become easily lost in trance, identified as a defended and controlling egoic self. When present, the solidity and constriction of egoic self dissolves, and our heart is free to respond to life with love, compassion, forgiveness and joy.
2014-03-12 - Guided Meditation: Cultivating a Relaxed Attentiveness
2014-03-05 - Part 4 - Opening to Joy - Our innate capacity for joy is blocked by our habitual ways of paying attention. This talk explores three key pathways of presence that connect us with our full openness and aliveness.
2014-03-05 - Guided Meditation: Dynamic Presence
2014-02-26-Guided Forgiveness Meditation - a short cut from the end of the "A Forgiving Heart" talk
2014-02-26 - Part 3 - A Forgiving Heart - Anger is an intelligent emotion, a natural part of our evolutionary design that lets us know when we are endangered or impeded in our progress. But when it locks into ongoing resentment and blame, our heart becomes armored and we lose access to a wholeness of being. This talk explores forgiving as a process of relaxing our armoring and awakening a healing compassion for ourselves and others.
2014-02-26 - Guided Meditation: A Healing Breath
2014-02-19 - Part 2: Heart of Compassion - Most of us consciously value compassion, but move through much of life without access to the full capacity of our heart. This talk explores the self-compassion that is the very grounds of loving our world.
2014-02-19 - Guided Meditation: Into Stillness
2013-10-07 - Mindfulness in Schools- Enabling Children to Realize their Full Potential - Congressman (OH) Tim Ryan speaks at Walt Whitman HS, Bethesda, MD.
2013-10-07 - Mindfulness in Schools- Enabling Children to Realize their Full Potential - This talk explores stress-related emotional suffering and how mindfulness and compassion practices can serve our children’s natural intelligence, creativity and openheartedness. Trainings in presence are the hope for this next generation, and the healing of our world. Talk given at Walt Whitman HS, Bethesda, MD.
2014-02-05 - Part 1: Universal Faces of Love - Lovingkindness, or metta, is the first of the four divine abodes in buddhist teachings. This talk explores the habitual patterns of fears and wants that obscure this innate quality of heart and key ways that we awaken ourselves to its luminous presence.
2014-02-05-Guided Meditation: Listening to and Feeling the Moment (2)
2009-05-02 - Awakening from Virtual Reality - This talk examines how we get stuck in identifying as a separate, deficient self, and the way that a deep attention frees us from trance. "The invitation of the Path is that we can wake up out of our stories of limitation and blame. We can listen to and touch the longing in us that really wants to love without holding back and live from freedom. And we can then look at what's true within us so deeply that we discover the very awake, empty presence th...
2012-04-28 Guided Heart Meditation: Lovingkindness (metta) from retreat
2014-01-22 - Listening to the Song - Listening with our full heart and attention is the gateway to understanding and love. This talk explores the challenges to deep listening, and offers ways of paying attention that awaken a healing listening presence.
2014-01-22 - Guided Meditation - A Listening Presence
2013-12-29 - Realizing Our Undefended and Awakened Heart (retreat talk) - It is our evolutionary and spiritual potential to release unnecessary habits of violating other tribes, individuals and unwanted parts of our own being. This talk explores three essential facets of the pathway to awakening: Leaving the fortress of aversive judgment, entering the wilderness of our embodied being and encircling this life with love.
