Whether the climate crisis, some other social issue or personal loss, sharing our pain by connecting with another helps us hold and process our grief. By opening the heart we can transform our feeling of isolation into one of shared humanity. This talk ends with a guided experiential dyad exercise adapting Joanna Macy’s "Learning to See Each Other" meditation from Coming Back to Life.

Greta Thunberg’s fearless willingness to speak the truth has inspired millions of youth to follow her lead resulting in the hugely successful September 20th Worldwide Climate Strike. Thunberg calls being on the autism spectrum her “superpower” because she doesn’t care what others think of her and only cares about telling the truth. Can we be like her, let go of our self-consciousness, not hold back and speak and act with honesty and courage?

A talk about how our benefactors impact us, wisdom and love they pass on from their benefactors and how we transmit those beautiful qualities to others who pas it on as well. No one "owns" those qualities. Rather we are part of a lineage of goodness.

How can dharma practice help white people in becoming more aware of the suffering of racism, both in seeing the pervasive ways it effects people of color, as well as the ways it keeps white folks from being truly free??? This talk will cover the universality of "othering," and how we might use wisdom and compassion to work our way past our ingrained conditioning.

this Dharma talk is a Q&A style talk collecting practice questions and then weaving them together.

The tenderness practice instructions during the meditation is a form of metta and compassion practice. It's one that helps ease the nervous system, hold difficulty and stress with care, and cultivates a kind attitude towards our mindfulness practice.

This week will conclude my series on the Three Truths of Existence, aka The Three Characteristics. So far we've explored the truth of impermanence and what it would be like to fully live from the understanding that all of nature, including us, is in constant flux. The last time I was there, we explored the second truth, not-self. We unpacked it's meaning and talked about how it fits with this spiritual path, as well as how it can inspire us in our day-to-day. This week we'll continue the conversation by including the third truth, the truth of suffering. This will be a pointing out teaching to better understand how we feed our cycles of stress, unsatisfactoriness, and unhappiness. We'll also look at how we can untangle and even uproot the habits and patterns in our mind that support such unhappy living and nurture a more wise and peaceful way of being.

With such disorienting events such as mass shootings in the news, how can we find our balance and hold things with equanimity, compassion and a wise dharma perspective. That is the theme for this talk.