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.