(Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC) Desire is intrinsic to all living forms – the urge to exist and flourish. It turns to suffering when, due to unmet needs, it contracts, intensifies and separates us from our full aliveness and awareness. These two talks guide us in awakening from this trance, and discovering how within desire is the longing that can carry us to true belonging.

(Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC) When our hearts open to the life that is here, just as it is, we discover vast loving presence. This meditation engages the smile as we scan through and awaken to our body and senses. Then we practice meeting the changing flow of life with a full allowing, wakeful and open awareness. We close with a verse from e.e. cummings.

“What happens when the heart says “Yes” to this moment? And what happens when that “Yes” goes even deeper?”

(Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC) Desire is intrinsic to all living forms – the urge to exist and flourish. It turns to suffering when, due to unmet needs, it contracts, intensifies and separates us from our full aliveness and awareness. These two talks guide us in awakening from this trance, and discovering how within desire is the longing that can carry us to true belonging.

(Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC) This practice uses the image and felt sense of a smile as we scan through the body, include sound and relax back into the awareness that is the source of all experience. By letting life be just as it is, we become pure living presence – wakeful, open and tender.

(Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC) One expression of suffering is forgetting that we are intrinsically lovable and worthy. This talk looks at the pathway to trusting our belonging, and focuses on the healing that comes from letting in love and mirroring others goodness.

Talk includes quotes from Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming

(Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC) This guided meditation includes a full body scan, and the recognition of the formless awareness that includes and is the source of all experience. By recognizing that awareness we discover the silence and stillness that is the ground of all experience.

(Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC) Our human loneliness and suffering arise from getting identified in a mental ego, and separating ourselves from the living web of our natural world. This talk explores the pathway back to sacred relationship, and offers reflections and practices that awaken intimacy with the non-human world.

(Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC) This guided practice awakens all the senses with an embodied presence, allowing an opening to the moment-to-moment changing flow of experience. We then relax back, resting as the changeless open awareness that is conscious of the flow, and includes all life.

(Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC) If we are suffering, we are believing an interpretation of reality that is limiting and untrue. At these times we are imprisoned in a painful looping of fear-driven thoughts and feelings. This talk explores the ways our practices of mindfulness, compassion and loving presence can guide us from addictive thinking to perceiving life with a wise heart.

(Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC) The receptivity of listening awakens us to the living stream of life. This meditation guides us in listening to sounds, and then listening to and feeling the aliveness of our bodies and the movement of the breath. We close with a simple offering of lovingkindness to our inner life and our world.

“Resting with the breath as a raft might rest and move with the waves…” ~ Tara