Guided Meditations

This basic mindfulness meditation brings awareness to breathing, amidst whatever the heart and mind are also experiencing.


This basic mindfulness meditation brings awareness into the body, amidst whatever the heart and mind are also experiencing.


This guided meditation uses awareness of sound to ground in the present moment.


This guided meditation models an exchange of good wishes with a person of your choice.


This guided meditation uses tree imagery to ground in present moment body sensations.


This guided meditation grounds awareness in the body as a way to relate to challenge or stress.


Talks

Webinar on mindfulness for Milton Academy, including overview of the practice, guided meditation, and Q & A.

Recorded May 5, 2020.


Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums presents an ideal of spiritual freedom, of wandering the world with little responsibility and structure as the way into self-realization. Classical Buddhism, however, seems to teach (and daily life to require) a degree of discipline and effort along our path. This talk will explore the balance of freedom and discipline in our practice, and how both can support devotion. Insights from sangha members’ own experiences will be invited at times throughout the talk.


The Buddha invites us to clearly see the world around us - a world infused with change, a world in which we don’t have inherent self-identity or complete control, a world with some degree of built-in suffering.

 

These Three Marks of Existence - anicca, anatta, and dukkha - may seem to cast a negative and conceptual framework over experience, and yet they are deeply personal, immediate, and even liberative. This talk will recast the Three Marks in terms of their positive potential - the possibilities enabled by change, the interconnection arising from not-self, and the harmony available by aligning with suffering. Teachings will be drawn from the Visuddhimagga, a classic 5th century Buddhist text, chaplaincy vignettes, and struggles with the speaker’s landlord.


Learning from snails, a look at how we also perpetually turn inward or outward, and how we can balance internally and externally resourcing ourselves.


Reflections on mindfulness as a body practice and the importance of wonder.