Archive of Talks

  • Forgiveness – the Path to Freedom and Healing

    Forgiveness is not a parami or a brahma-vihara. However, forgiveness is an important skill for us to develop along the Buddha’s path. Forgiveness requires love, compassion, joy and equanimity. As part of the human experience we will naturally be hurt and hurt others. If we cannot forgive others or cannot forgive ourselves, our suffering will only continue the… Read more

  • What the Earth can Teach us about Equanimity

    Eveline guided our reflections this Sunday, exploring how we can learn a lot about being equanimous by investigating our interbeing with the earth.      The Buddha often remarked that the earth accommodates everything that happens to it without reactivity: it is whole and equanimous.  We often feel we need to find our way back to the… Read more

  • The stories we tell ourselves

    If we look at the stories that make up most of our mental chatter, we come to see that even if they seem to range broadly, they are mostly in fact about ourselves, and actually help to create and the sense of self.   This phenomenon, called mana papanca (mental proliferation around the sense of self), and… Read more

  • Short, Clear, And Surprisingly Profound: Buddha’s instructions to Bahiya

    We reflected this week on the instructions that the Buddha gave to Bahiya about what is sometimes called bare attention, or sometimes mindfulness:  “In the seen, let there be just the seen, in the heard let there be just the heard”, and so on.  These ostensibly simple instructions are at the heart of the practice,… Read more

  • Seeking to not-know

    When we study a natural phenomenon or a discipline, we usually seek to accumulate knowledge, hoping to find wisdom that will help us to grasp the situation clearly. With meditation, the approach may sometimes be reversed: we may seek to shed old ways of seeing, and genuinely attempt to not-know. Eric guided our reflections this… Read more

  • Music, Surprise, and the impact of Impermanence

    Darryl guided our reflections on the Surprise of Impermanence this Sunday, drawing on excerpts from a talk by Carol Wilson, and using a musical recording to explore our shifting response to impermanence itself. Carol’s talk can be found here: https://dharmaseed.org/talks/73270/ You can listen to the music that was shared from Plum Village at this link:… Read more