On a North London Buddhist Centre Weekend retreat, Karunagita introduces the theme 'Turning towards the Nature of Experience, by drawing out Padmasambhava's advice to Queen Ngang Chung. There is letting go as well as turning towards, with details from her own life

Was Buddhism designed for city dwellers, or for the secluded country retreat? How can you practise in the city? The Buddha was raised in a 500 BCE Indian city, his searching for enlightenment took place in the unspoiled forests, but much of his teaching was to townies like us. Ratnaprabha describes three metaphorical or mythic cities in ancient Buddhist texts, and shows how the city can be a positive context for practice.

In this talk for the Sangha Day festival at the North London Buddhist Centre, Ratnaprabha celebrates the joys of friendship in the Buddha's time and today, and explains how Sangha (spiritual community)can be continually created through the way we communicate and treat each other.

Dhammamegha describes her first-hand experience of the minority regime stoking fear in her native South Africa under apartheid, and Mandela's heroic humanising of contact between people of different ethnicities. Can you meet examples of people who change a situation by going out of their way to be kind? She goes into the Buddha's teaching on fear, hostility and mental disturbance in the Attadanda Sutta. Do you overcome duality be enlarging or by diminishing the Self? Are values more powerful than fear?

Karunagita offers a personal take on the traditional story of the Buddha’s ‘going forth’ from his home to seek enlightenment and explores what that might mean for us in 2019 London. Can you find moments when you go forth from habitual and seemingly easier ways of being to something that you can recognise as lighter, freer, perhaps even happier?

Our sense of separateness and fixedness keeps us small and limited; Jnanavaca explains how Buddhist practice aims for freedom from those constraints. Can you sense the great ocean of consciousness, or are you confined to one ripple on its surface?

North London Buddhist Centre Budcast talk, September 2019. Love, metta in Buddhism, reflects the universal human need for real connection. Kusala, mitra convenor at the NLBC, shows how the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm and the Buddha see eye-to-eye on what real love entails. Both offer very helpful tips on how to cultivate it.

"To live the Buddhist life, to become like the Buddha, we must imagine the Buddha" (Sangharakshita). How do we do this? And how can we cultivate our imaginative faculty in an urban world where empty images constantly vie for our attention? One of our monthly Saturday 'Budcast' talks, suitable for all.

This is the first 20 minutes of a talk on how Buddhism arrived in London, and how to practise in the city. (The rest of the talk failed to record).

Karunagita, author of 'A Path for Parents' on Buddhist parenting, introduces the fifth spiritual faculty, Wisdom. She shows how we don't need to be bamboozled by our thoughts if we can see their nature. She shows that emptiness or ungraspability reveals a taste of freedom, a freedom in life, not a detachment from it. She suggests some 'easy insights' into emptiness. Above all, wisdom is conjoined to compassion.