Be Here Now Network

Joseph Goldstein explores the concept of dependent origination – the law of causality and conditioning – so we can understand the process that keeps us bound to the Wheel of Samsara.

“In every moment of noticing, in every moment of being mindful, when there is no ignorance, when there is no delusion, when we are seeing things actually as they are, in that moment, the mind is purified; we are breaking this chain of dependent origination, we are breaking the link of it.” – Joseph Goldstein

In this episode, Joseph explores:

The Wheel of Life, also known as the Wheel of Samsara

Why the law of dependent origination, or the law of causality and conditioning, keeps us bound to the Wheel of Samsara

Each link along the chain of dependent origination

How cycles within the 12 links in the law of dependent origination keep the wheel forever spinning

How Vipassana practice can help us cut into those cycles and break the chain of dependent origination

This dharma talk from October 29, 1985, was originally published on Dharma Seed.

Mindfully retelling ancient Buddhist Dharma stories, Jack reflects on what it means to live with a wise heart.

"For someone who wants to break free inside of the forces of ignorance, delusion, habit, and sleepwalking—you must really see that there's something greater than just getting through each day, and devote yourself in some fashion to it." – Jack Kornfield

In this episode, Jack opens us to:

- Modern retellings of ancient Buddhist Dharma stories

- The courage and mystery of the heart

- The law of karma and the power of intention

- The compelling nature of spiritual practice

- Buddha's past life as a lion living on an island with an elephant friend

- Discovering what is love, and what is goodness in the heart

- Learning to listen to where our actions comes from

"Find a place in yourself—in your being, your heart—that really wants to understand what life and death is about, that wants to live in a different way. Let that be the source of your inspiration, the source of your guidance." – Jack Kornfield

This Dharma Talk from 3/23/86 at Spirit Rock Meditation Center was originally published on DharmaSeed.org

On a mission to connect hearts all over the world through Indigenous wisdom, Anita Sanchez illuminates her new book, The Four Sacred Gifts, with Raghu.

Sign up for Ram Dass's Yoga of Heartfulness Course, starting May 15th, at RamDass.org/heart

“Out of the beingness that is whole, loving, collaborative, and grateful, then we do the doing. Wellbeing inspires well-doing.” – Anita Sanchez, Ph.D

This time on Mindrolling, Raghu talks with Anita Sanchez about:

- Receiving wisdom, dreams, and prophecies passed down by indigenous elders

- The healing path and how indigenous wisdom paved Anita’s way

- Creating harmony in the heart, mind, body, and spirit to radiate it to the world

- ‘The Hoop of Life’ as an emblem for unity

- Forgiveness as a pathway to freedom, a pathway to love fully, and the passcode to your own divinity

- Putting ‘wise hope’ into action

“It’s a good day to heal. It's a good day to forgive. It’s a good day to be in unity. It’s a good day to have more dreams and more hope in action.” – Anita Sanchez, Ph.D

About Anita Sanchez, Ph.D:

Anita was born into a Midwest family that was economically poor, yet rich in Mexican-American and Nahua (also known as Aztec) heritage. Fortified with the strength of her elders and connection to the earth, she became the first in her family of over one hundred first cousins to earn a doctorate degree. She has gone on to a career as an international transformational leader.

Dr. Sanchez is committed to bridging indigenous wisdom and science with or contemporary work and life, to support our individual wholeness and collective conscious evolution in partnership with People, Spirit, and the Earth. With her loving spirit, presence and skill, Anita inspires people around the world to discover and trust their gifts, to become life-giving connections to all, in service and joy.

Learn more about Anita’s soul work at anita-sanchez.com and get the book, The Four Sacred Gifts, at foursacredgifts.com

Joseph Goldstein explores wisdom from the Tao and talks about how we can learn to settle back into each moment and establish ourselves in the rhythm of experience.

This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Click to receive 10% off your first month with your own licensed professional therapist: betterhelp.com/insighthour

“When we can settle back and allow the change, allow the process of change to unfold without interfering, without pushing the river, then we establish ourselves in the rhythm of experience. And the rhythm carries us, just as in any activity, in music, in sport, in nature; the rhythm carries the experience when it’s not interfered with. And in that, there’s a grace, there’s a harmony, there’s a balance.” – Joseph Goldstein

In this episode, Joseph explores:

Learning to settle back and become one with each moment of experience

How the appreciation of rhythm has to do with the full awareness of change and how we can establish ourselves in the rhythm of experience

The difference between non-action and inaction

How the simplicity of the Buddha’s teachings leads to great spaciousness

Some of the wisdom from the Tao Te Ching

The obstacles in the way of the simple practice of settling back into each moment, including our sense of self

This dharma talk from December 7, 1986, was originally published on Dharma Seed.

In this vintage Dharma Talk, Jack illuminates Buddhism's Three Characteristics of Life: stress, non-self, and impermanence.

Today's podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Click to receive 10% off your first month with your own licensed professional therapist: betterhelp.com/heartwisdom

"Somehow we believe our concepts, that we'll be here forever, that our life is really going to go on and on. Or we believe our advertising, the idea from the culture that if you get 'this' you'll be able to hold onto it and it will make you happy. It's just not true. Happiness is a matter of the heart; not something we can grasp or hold." – Jack Kornfield

In this episode, Jack mindfully explores:

- Knowledge, love, patience, and a spirit of constancy

- Being here now and living in mindfulness in the present moment

- Buddhism's Three Characteristics of Life

- - Anicca: impermanence

- - Anatta: non-self

- - Dukkha: stress/suffering

- True happiness as a matter of the heart

- How you can't stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf

- The original truth of self and freedom

This teaching is part of a 4-week long Yoga of Heartfulness online course featuring teachings from Ram Dass and friends. Learn more about this 10 hour course: Ram Dass' Yoga of Heartfulness

This flowing lecture from 4/18/1985 was originally published on DharmaSeed

Discussing the intensity of painful emotions, Krishna Das describes how practicing letting go can allow us to live at home within ourselves.

Today's podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Click to receive 10% off your first month with your own licensed professional therapist: betterhelp.com/beherenow

“Right now, we’re programmed to hold onto everything. But over time, we can let go of our identification with the negative states of mind, the negative self images, and the negative stories we tell ourselves. But you can’t push those away. We have to train ourselves to release them.” – Krishna Das

This episode features a special kirtan with Krishna Das and friends, Benjy and Heather Wertheimer and Steve Gorn, as well as a conversation on:

- How regular practice allows us to habituate to the feeling of letting go to allow intense emotions to run through us

- Maharaj-ji’s response to the death of a devotee

- A miracle story about Swami Nityananda

- The lila when Ram Dass gave Maharaj-ji the first copy of Be Here Now

- Maharaj-ji sending Krishna Das back to America to deal with his desires

- Learning to trust yourself as the most important part of the spiritual path

This teaching is part of a 4-week long Yoga of Heartfulness online course featuring teachings from Ram Dass and friends. Learn more about this 10 hour course: Ram Dass' Yoga of Heartfulness

If you enjoyed the episode, dive into the heart work of Benjy and Heather Wertheimer at shantalamusic.com, and Steve Gorn at stevegorn.com.

In this special episode, Raghu, RamDev (Dale Borglum), and Jackie Dobrinska weave the tapestry for heartfulness as a way of life.

Sign up for Ram Dass's Yoga of Heartfulness Course, starting May 15th, at RamDass.org/heart

“The development of heartfulness will help—we expect—to transform the polarity that we’re living in within ourselves and in our society and culture.” – Raghu Markus

In this episode of Mindrolling, Raghu, RamDev, and Jackie tap into:

- The path for cultivating heartfulness

- The abundance of ways that one can be in the presence of the divine

- Raghu meeting Ram Dass for the first time

- Navigating suffering with an open heart

- Practices for developing the heart-mind

- The antidote for isolation and separateness

- A heart-awakening meditation guided by RamDev

“The heart begins to reveal how spacious it is, how connected it is. It's as vast as the sky. It's boundless.” – RamDev

“To hold our humanity in the context of our divinity, that’s the work.” – RamDev

About RamDev:

Dale Borglum is the founder and Executive Director of The Living/Dying Project. He is a pioneer in the conscious dying movement and has worked directly with thousands of people with life-threatening illness and their families for over 30 years. In 1981, Dale founded the first residential facility for people who wished to die consciously in the United States, The Dying Center. He has taught and lectured extensively on the topics of spiritual support for those with life-threatening illness, on caregiving as a spiritual practice, and on healing at the edge, the edge of illness, of death, of loss, of crisis.

Learn more about The Living/Dying Project at livingdying.org

About Jackie Dobrinska:

Jackie Dobrinska is the Director of Education, Community & Inclusion for Ram Dass' Love, Serve, Remember Foundation and the current host of Ram Dass’ Here & Now podcast. She is also a teacher, coach, and spiritual director with the privilege of marrying two decades of mystical studies with 15 years of expertise in holistic wellness. As an interspiritual minister, Jackie was ordained in Creation Spirituality in 2016 and has also studied extensively in several other lineages - the plant-medicine-based Pachakuti Mesa Tradition, Sri Vidya Tantra, Western European Shamanism, Christian Mysticism, the Wise Woman Tradition, and others. Today, in addition to building courses and community for LSRF, she leads workshops and coaches individuals to discover, nourish and live from their most authentic selves.

Learn more about Jackie’s work at asimplevibrantlife.com.

Joseph Goldstein examines what happiness is and how we get it, plus he outlines the very ordered stages of progress that occur on the path of insight and wisdom.

“There’s another kind of happiness, which is higher even than the happiness of concentration, and that’s the happiness of insight, the happiness of wisdom, when we really come to a deep and profound understanding of who we are, of what this life is about.” – Joseph Goldstein

In this episode, Joseph explores:

- The happiness born from sense pleasures, not only in this realm but in the higher realms

- How purity of conduct, through both generosity and understanding virtue, can bring sense pleasures

- The happiness that comes from concentration

- The happiness that comes from insight and wisdom

- The very ordered way that the progress of insight unfolds: psychological insights, purity of view, vipassana happiness, fear of the process of existence, the urge for deliverance, the stage of equanimity, and finally, opening to the unconditioned, that which is beyond the mind.

This dharma talk from October 14, 1982, was originally published on Dharma Seed.

Jack returns with a cosmic Dharma Talk exploring expansion and contraction in relation to impermanence as the root of spiritual practice.

"The law of change is the brown rice and vegetables of spiritual practice, it's the root of our direct experience of life." – Jack Kornfield

In this episode, Jack takes us on a cosmic journey through:

The basic fundamentals of Dharma teachings on how to live wisely in our practice

A trippy interstellar perspective flip through a simple intergalactic thought experiment

Life—this capacity to be conscious and aware—as a process of expansion and contraction

The law of change, impermanence, as the "brown rice and vegetables" of spiritual practice

Spiritual practice as a way to find freedom and compassion within ourselves

Learning to live in the present of how it is, rather than how we wish it would be

This Dharma Talk from Spirit Rock Meditation Center on 6/20/1994 was originally published on DharmaSeed.

Discussing the inevitability of suffering, Krishna Das guides us on returning to our true, present nature.

Today's podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Click to receive 10% off your first month with your own licensed professional therapist: betterhelp.com/beherenow

“There's no escaping suffering, that is the number one truth. This world is filled with it. We can develop a way to live in a world that changes the way we react to difficult and painful circumstances.” – Krishna Das

This episode features a virtual kirtan with Krishna Das and a discussion on:

Allowing love to show its face

The grace of the saints and the guru

The Ramayana

The inevitability of suffering

Presence and our true nature