These are talks I give on Thursday morning as part of the daily online meditations led by Buddhist teachers on Colorado’s Front Range (8:00 – 8:45 am MT). The login information changes every week, so it is helpful to be on a teacher’s email list to get the weekly announcement. You can join my email list by clicking here.
Emotional Wisdom and Resilience
November 14, 2024 31:20 AUDVID
In responding to this challenging time, of course we must take outer action, but the inner action of meditation is equally important. In particular, meditation allows us to manage our emotional lives wisely to stay open-hearted, find resiliency and experience well-being. The key is to stay aware of our physical experience. A guided meditation on Peter’s approach to being mindful of emotions (RATA) starts at 17:30.
What We Can Do
How can we respond to the dramatic turn our country made in the 2024 election? We can take action in three spheres: inwardly, through our practice that trains us in so much of what seems lacking in our society – peacefulness, non-judgment, curiosity, and deep listening; outwardly in our web of relationships, prioritizing our deepest values such as civility, truthfulness, honoring diversity, and responding instead of reacting; and outwardly in society, motivated by love to work for democracy and justice.
A Bodhisattva Heart for Difficult Times
October 31, 2024 23:20 AUD
Meditation practice is the key tool to help us navigate this difficult time, giving us the ability to drop into the natural peace of the present moment, free of time, stress and suffering. This uncovers our Bodhisattva heart, which turns action into service, which is motivated by love, guided by wisdom, and secure in the insights that what we have in common is deeper that what separates us, that we can oppose harmful actions without opposing people, and that justice is love expressed outwardly.
Too Much Empathy, Not Enough Compassion?
February 15, 2024 2o:53 AUDVID
There are important differences between empathy and compassion. As helpful as empathy is, it can lead to burnout, inaction or bias in our concern for others. Empathy tends to come from automatic and unconscious areas of the brain, while compassion accesses areas associated with choice, positivity and learning. Compassion uplifts the heart, connects us to all beings, and motivates us to act, while empathy may not.
Mindfulness Medication for Pain Relief
Traditional Western medicine views illness as occurring in body that is like a machine with something broken. The latest scientific research shows, instead, that illness occurs in a body-mind-heart system embedded within social ties that can falter and heal in complex ways. Peter talks about his experience with a knee injury and how mindfulness can aid healing by letting go of catastrophic stories, decreasing stress, regulating the nervous system, and activating our immune response.
Happiness and Happiness
January 18, 2024 21:51 AUD
The Buddhist tradition favors cultivating the happiness of understanding, which is lasting, over the happiness of mood, which changes with conditions. However, when we purposely cultivate happy moods in meditation we enjoy practice more, the mind is more focused and we are more motivated to meditate. All this leads to the understanding that we are not separate and truly belong. It turns out that conditional happiness CAN lead to unconditional happiness!
‘Tis the Season to be Spiritual
December 21, 2023 22:22 AUDVID
To help Buddhist practitioners inject spirituality into the holidays, this talk casts science and Christianity in contemplative terms. Science is spiritual in that it uncovers wonder and mystery, be it in the cosmos or the human body. Contemplative interpretations of religion radically differ from traditional ones, based as they are on personal experience instead of dogma. Contemplative Christian practice delivers the same ultimate insights and unity experiences as Buddhist practice.
Homage to Beloved Teacher Tory Capron
My dear friend and beloved dharma teacher Tory Capron died of ALS on Dec. 7th, 2023. Tory used her dying process as her last teaching, modelling how to meet death with acceptance, courage, and deep presence. May Tory continue to inspire us all to deepen our spiritual paths and to use all challenges as opportunities to awaken to pure awareness and great love.
The Good News: Your Suffering is Based on Illusion
Our suffering is based on the illusion that we are separate. If our deepest wish is to belong, language gets in the way with subject-verb-object grammar that creates entities with essences that are separate from one other. For example, the thought, “I had a nice meditation,” makes you a separate thing that is interacting with a separate meditation. Weird. We overcome this illusion when we recognize that all entities are “temporary collections.” Through repeatedly enacting this thought, we move towards belonging and happiness.
Leaning on a Waterfall
Conceptual mind obscures the flow of life and converts it into solid objects that we can possess or have. We can see these cognitive errors in the simplest of statements: “We had a good chat,” or “I am having a hard day.” These errors cause us to suffer because we cannot own or have flow. If the law of relating to objects is possession, then the law of relating to flow is dance. Thinking that we can have happiness as a state or a thing is akin to leaning on a waterfall. Instead, we must do the dances (activities) that create the activity of well-being: mindfulness, kindness, and generosity.
Awareness of Space, Dropping into Being
Sensory clarity, being clear about what in our experience is physical and what is mental, shows us that our five physical senses contain no sense of time, stress, or separateness. All that is in the mind. In this guided meditation of our physical senses, we feel space in the body, hear space in the soundscape, and see space through our eyes, which can lead to an experience of oneness – no inner, no outer, no boundary, no separation and no suffering.
The Buddha Solved Your Problem, Part 2
Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Buddha sat under a tree and solved your problem. What is your problem? It is the same as the Buddha’s and of every human being – we only know how to be happy when having a pleasant experience. The Buddha’s awakening under the Bodhi tree was the discovery of how to be happy no matter what, whether the feeling tone of our experience is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Our relationship with feeling tone is the essence of the entire Buddhist path – a reactive relationship makes us suffer, a responsive relationship awakens us.
The Buddha Solved Your Problem, Part 1
Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Buddha sat under a tree and solved your problem. What is your problem? It is the same as the Buddha’s and of every human being – we only know how to be happy when having a pleasant experience. The Buddha’s awakening under the Bodhi tree was the discovery of how to be happy no matter what, whether the feeling tone of our experience is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Our relationship with feeling tone is the essence of the entire Buddhist path – a reactive relationship makes us suffer, a responsive relationship awakens us.
Karma: Change Your Mind to Change Your Life
Changing habits is a popular theme as the new year approaches. Understanding karma as mental habit is the foundation of lasting change. We can only change our habits and our karma right now in this moment. Restrictive, control-oriented approaches usually fail to create long-term behavior change. A mindfulness-oriented approach, where we wake up to the desire that fuels unhealthy behavior, makes us feel free inside and naturally inclines us towards healthy habits.
Gratitude that Includes All
November 24, 2022 15:17AUD
In polarized times such as these, Thanksgiving is an important day of gratitude for the whole nation. To truly be inclusive, our honoring of the day must account for the violent history towards first peoples upon which our country is based. May our nation respond to this history with justice. Saying thank you is not just good manners, but a deep spiritual path. The more thanks we give, the happier we feel.
Mindfulness, Embodiment and Joy
Though we are social creatures, we limit expressing ourselves to just words, forgetting we have an entire body with which to engage the world. This is a talk and guided mindful movement. Through embodiment we broaden our ability to meditate and we contact energy, aliveness and joy. Let your whole body be your ally in working through challenges and finding resilience and your authentic self.
Bowing to the Sacred: The Spiritual Power of Devotion
We may shy away from devotion when associate it with blind faith, in believing something we don’t know to be true. When instead we hold it as a way of honoring the beauty and wisdom of the dharma, devotion creates inspiration for practice and accelerates our path.
When is Desire Helpful?
Desire is typically seen as the Buddhist bugaboo, the main mind state that obstructs happiness. Indeed, when we want things to be different than they are, desire is an obstacle. But when desire is in service of connecting with reality and opening to life as it is, it is a very helpful state that leads to true happiness. In this context desire is sacred.
Resiliency, Part 2: Mindfulness of Emotions
In this difficult time of climate change, political dysfunction and the loss of people in our local sangha, how do we stay resilient and not lose heart? Mindfulness is just the ticket, helping us stay open in the face of difficulty, while not being swept away by it. The key to resiliency is seeing, in the space of our kind attention, that emotions are flow. They are energy that wants to move and, in doing so, resolve themselves.
Resiliency, Part 1: Compassion
In this difficult time of climate change, political dysfunction and the loss of people in our local sangha, how do we stay resilient and not lose heart? Compassion is just the ticket, helping us move closer to our pain and be kind to it, instead of resisting it. Compassion turns pain into a gateway for connecting deeply with ourselves and others, and feeling connected uplifts the heart.
Relational Dharma
In our interdependent world, every activity involves relationship, so relating well is an essential need for all of life. While meditation is normally viewed as a solo sport, it is, in fact, a deep training in relational skill. Mindfulness and metta meditation teach us how to: pay attention and listen deeply, be kind, be empathic yet not codependent, connect with others from our authentic selves, and stay in relationship with those with whom we have conflict.
The Peace that Lies Beyond Hope and Fear
Hope and fear are the root reactive states that disconnect us from reality. Buddhist meditation practices teach us how to let go of these states through present moment awareness and lovingkindness. Giving up hope is not pessimism, but dropping wishful thinking and working with things as they are. Letting go of fear is not so much getting rid of it, but learning to hold it with compassion and being willing to act with courage.
The Body as a Road Map to Awakening
Feeling tone in the body – pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral sensations – is a map for awakening: conducive states such as relaxation, generosity, and interest tend to be pleasant in the body, while states that obstruct awakening, such as greed or aversion, tend to be unpleasant. The experience of the body is a more reliable pointer to awakening than that of the mind. For instance, while objects of greed are pleasant as thoughts, the state of greed is often tense and unpleasant in the body.
Effortless Awareness
There are many gateways to awakening: through realizing not-self, through unconditional love, or through opening to pure awareness. The latter is the mainstay of non dual approaches. Dual approaches such as insight meditation arrive at the non dual by focusing on the effortless nature of awareness.
Just Sit There, Part Two
The talk explores the lighter side of Buddhist practice, poking fun at both our mindfulness and our mindlessness practice. From the follies of thinking mind to a culture that uses cell phones to meditate and creates such ironies as mindful poker, the spiritual path provides plenty of opportunity for laughter. See part one of the talk near the middle of this page.
What If You Were in Heaven, But Just Had Not Noticed?
November 26, 2020 14:40 VIDEO
The world we truly live in is not our nation, our town, or even our home, but the world of our mental habits. Everything we experience is filtered through these habits. Since the negativity bias of the brain is so dominant, we need to create mental balance by actively focusing on what is right, what is working, what is beautiful, and what is good. Saying thank you is not just good manners but a deep spiritual path.
Wisdom of the Body
October 1, 2020 11:34VIDEO
Insight meditation emphasizes being mindful of the body because it: is immersed in the present moment, is a refuge during emotional storms, is the truth teller of our experience, and is a road map to enlightenment and letting go.
Your Whole Life As a Path of Wisdom and Love
September 24, 2020 9:01 VIDEO
As important as meditation is to awakening, the Buddha taught a more comprehensive approach called the Eightfold Path, in which our whole life is a vehicle for spiritual growth. In addition to meditation, the path develops wisdom as we align our thoughts with reality; works with speech to help us relate more deeply; and explores how to bring a spiritual dimension to our work. This powerful approach to awakening perfects both wisdom and love.
The Art of Letting Go
September 17, 2020 11:58 VIDEO
While letting go is the key to meditation practice, it is easy to practice a distorted letting go that leads to spiritual bypass, self-judgment, and attachment to view. True letting go is subtle, demanding, and leads to real happiness. It is not about getting rid of anything, but about allowing and waking up to everything.
Principles of Dharma-Based Action
August 20, 2020 11:34 AUDIO
In a world as troubled as ours, how do we make taking action a spiritual path? In accord with the truth of interdependence, we must care for all the relationships involved as we advocate for our beliefs. Our motivation comes from love and care instead of hate or aggression. We can oppose harmful actions, speech and views, without opposing people. It is also key to let go of attachment to view or to results.
White Privilege and Racial Injustice
June 4, 2020 8:23 AUDIO
In a world rife with racial injustice, whites can become allies to people of color by: educating themselves about their whiteness, owning that they have a cultural bias; educating themselves about the unearned advantages of white privilege; listening to those who do not look like them; and being willing to make mistakes and get feedback in order to learn.
Concentration, Clarity, and the End of Suffering
May 31 2020 9:23 AUDIO
Meditation teacher Shinzen Young says that we suffer with something only when we are unable to have a complete experience of it. This means physical pain or difficult emotions are not problematic if we can be fully mindful of them. Pleasant experiences are equally workable when we are deeply aware of them. The beauty of mindfulness is that nothing in our experience need change to feel free and at ease.
The Two Secrets of Working with Difficult Emotions
May 14 2020 8:52 AUDIO
The key issue in our difficulty with a person, or with the world, is the emotions they provoke in us – fear, anger, impatience, grief, etc. How can we stay open-hearted in the midst of such states? The talk offers two simple phrases that direct mindfulness to make any difficult state workable.
Working Wisely with Fear
April 30, 2020 14:40 AUDIO
How do we work wisely with fear, opening our heart to it while not being swept away by it? Mindfulness is just the ticket, allowing us to experience fear and see it clearly. When we see the threefold nature of fear – it is a fantasy, it is future thinking, and it is unpleasant – it loses its power over us and we discover courage. When we see that fear is workable, we gain confidence that our life and the world are workable.