Happy New Year! May 2021 prove a kinder, more hopeful year for all.

In this first podcast of the year we turn to the magic of inner transformation, with a special episode to mark our forthcoming Home Retreat: 'The Alchemical Heart' with Paramananda.

In our conversation around the work involved with an "alchemical" approach to meditation Paramananda explores the relationship between Buddhist perspectives on life and the social, political and psychological realms. And most importantly, its connection to a sense of reality as fundamentally poetic in nature. All in service to figuring out how we can live from a genuine, authentic place in our own experience.

Aside from alchemy's place in various western wisdom traditions, if here it is all about internal change, then, says Paramananda, the body is the vessel: this is where the work happens - because it is the nearest bit of reality with which we can become intimate. And to do so we must engage with the language of the heart, which is the language of images.

To hear Paramananda speak about meditation as a way to truly experience "the poetics of the breath", we know we're in for something extraordinary. Come and join ups on the alchemical journey! In your own time and way on Home Retreat, bring your own body, longing and love.

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Paramananda has been teaching meditation for over 35 years and is well known for his body-based, poetic approach. He has published a number of books on meditation including ‘Change Your Mind’ and, most recently, ‘The Myth of Meditation’.

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Check out our Dharma Toolkit space for details of all we have on offer to help you make it through the pandemic and stay inspired.

Come meditate with us any week day!

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Theme music by Ackport! Used with kind permission.

#coronavirus #Covid19 #crisis #pandemic #Buddhism #Buddhist #Buddha #Dharma #Triratna #community #sangha #meditation #mindfulness #alchemy #alchemical #imagination #images #transformation 

A bonus episode with extra material from last episode’s wonderful conversation with Vaddhaka, author of ‘The Buddha On Wall Street’.

In part 2 of our discussion about the contribution Buddhism may have to make to all matters economic, we turn to the post-pandemic realities now faced around the world. The times prompt a reconsideration of the “attention economy” and its relationship to social inequality when everyone’s lives are much more centred on the web. And we explore the relationship between the “wellbeing economy” and ideas of economic growth; as well as whether the community-led origins of the UK ‘Welfare State’ might serve as a model for the future.

Some fundamental questions are asked and well met: What do we value as  a society? What does human nature tend towards? What does the “common weal” look like after COVID-19? Finding throughout the conversation the opportunities for kindness in our dealings with each other – beyond economic and political positions.

The Buddha On Wall Street by Vaddhaka Linn

Listen to a mini-series of podcasts on The Buddha On Wall Street

Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman

Humankind by Rutger Bregman

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Check out our Dharma Toolkit space for details of all we have on offer to help you make it through the pandemic and stay inspired.

Come meditate with us any week day!

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Theme music by Ackport! Used with kind permission.

#coronavirus #Covid19 #crisis #pandemic #Buddhism #Buddhist #Buddha #Dharma #Triratna #community #sangha #economics #economy #money #democracy #Socialism #NeoLiberalism #wellbeing #kindness #Capitalism

We're back with the first episode in a two-part conversation about what Buddhism has to say to 21st C. economics in the wake of populist political tides, globalization and, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vaddhaka is the author of The Buddha On Wall Street, a Buddhist critique of Neo-Liberal notions of capitalism. Expect a stirring, provocative discussion around the state of western democracies in relation to economics, and the hope offered by community-led responses to the despair felt by many around the world who feel left behind.

How can Buddhism respond to inequality, the need for social justice, poverty and class differences? What does the history of "free-thinking British Socialism" have to tell us today? And how might we move towards an economics of wellbeing?

The Buddha On Wall Street by Vaddhaka Linn

Listen to a mini-series of podcasts on The Buddha On Wall Street

Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton

The economic philosophy of John Maynard Keynes

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Check out our Dharma Toolkit space for details of all we have on offer to help you make it through the weirdness and stay inspired.

Come meditate with us any week day!

***

Theme music by Ackport! Used with kind permission.

#coronavirus #Covid19 #crisis #pandemic #Buddhism #Buddhist #Buddha #Dharma #Triratna #community #sangha #economics #economy #money #democracy #Socialism #NeoLiberalism #wellbeing #kindness #Capitalism

Hello again! We're back for a new season of The Dharma Toolkit podcast from The Buddhist Centre Online. We've had a wee break, passed through fleeting summer, and are turning towards the first fall/autumn of these strange, pandemic times ready to renew our own sense of connection through community with you. Welcome aboard!

We begin again by following up and extending our previous mini-series 'The Many Jewels: Buddhism, Writing and the Arts' about the place of poetry and art in forming a response to sorrow, to challenge, to life itself. Once more our co-host is Padmacandra, helping bring together voices and experiences that can speak to why this is both urgent and profoundly hopeful: sounding and standing through the beauty and pain with the huge perspective of the Dharma as a backdrop, akin to the universe itself, whether starry or starless.

Today we're with Sahajatara, exploring creativity and meaning at the juncture between life and death. Encountering strange creatures at the edges, feeling for the depth of the blue sea and of the earth "Apparelled in celestial light". Waiting for something to arise in the light and dark of it all.

Ted Hughes looms large; Elizabeth Bishop comes in; William Stafford speaks with the Muses; and the mad woman at the shore is there with us as the conversation unwinds into personal myth, mundane magic and the practice of the 'soulful life'.

'Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood' by William Wordsworth

Elizabeth Bishop: 'The Moose' and 'At the Fishhouses'.

The French Lieutenant's Woman (film)

'Apparition of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary' by Janet Gyatso

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Check out our Dharma Toolkit space for details of all we have on offer to help you make it through the weirdness and stay inspired.

Come meditate with us any week day!

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Theme music by Ackport! Used with kind permission.

#coronavirus #Covid19 #crisis #pandemic #Buddhism #Buddhist #Buddha #Dharma #Triratna #community #sangha #love #poetry #Arts #art #images 'JigmeLingpa #TedHughes #SylviaPlath #wabisabi #WilliamStafford

What is it to be fully aware, fully alive? Here is a great conversation with the retreat team from Taraloka, who are about to lead our online Home Retreat around the relief and ease of being in the present moment – whatever that present moment looks like.

Experience can be an adventure in awareness. How can we taste the deep excitement of opening to the nature of reality itself – right here, right now? Rooted in a thorough exploration of the Buddha's teaching on the four foundations of mindfulness, this a delightful evocation of how freedom of the heart is available to anyone.

Taraloka is a women’s Buddhist retreat centre, founded in 1985. Ever since, they've been offering a breadth and depth of retreats for all levels of experience. But with coronavirus they’ve had to shut the buildings and go online to offer what they do to everyone across the globe, while still living and working as a residential community through lockdown.

We hear how the crisis has brought out the best in the community. And the spirit of Taraloka's approach to Dharma practice - and of their beautiful Welsh retreat centre - comes across strongly. The qualities of Green Tara made manifest as part of a lineage of women sharing, practising, handing on the Dharma.

Read about the Satipatthana Sutta (Foundations of Mindfulness)

Follow Taraloka on YouTube to see their Dharma reflections on the natural world

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Check out our Dharma Toolkit space for details of all we have on offer to help you make it through the weirdness and stay inspired.

Come meditate with us any week day!

***

Theme music by Ackport! Used with kind permission.

#coronavirus #Covid19 #crisis #pandemic #Buddhism #Buddhist #Buddha #Dharma #Triratna #community #sangha #mindfulness #meditation #Satipatthana #body #breath #mind #heart

Join us for a walk into the forest of the unknown. Enchantments await. Groves of images. Bridges to the unseen. A path that wanders lost until some deeper magic happens...

We are back in the realm of art and the making of images, the making of things, the making of meaning. Nagasiddhi's trainings in technical sculpture, prop design and building, the rituals of puppetry, and carpentry with wood left by his father long ago - all these have prepared him for a life of inhabiting his craft in the context of Buddhist practice.

We are with an artist at work in that country where the river under the river flows. Only now there is the deep underworld of uncertainty to contend with. Reflections on pandemic, on the nature of creativity, on the totemic aspects of imagination itself. From James Hillman to Philip Glass to Diana Wynne Jones and The Psychedelic Furs: this is a conversation where culture collides with fairy tales and you can almost taste the bittersweet air of inspiration, the peace of attending to old thing and lost things and all the found objects of the heart.

Featured this week:

Nagasiddhi's art

Gino Bartali, the war hero cyclist from Italy

Song by John Donne & Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

James Hillman's 'The Dream and the Underworld'

Kiki Smith on art as a bridge to the unseen

The Psychedelic Furs, 'Made of Rain (released July 2020): on Apple Music | on Spotify

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Check out our Dharma Toolkit space for details of all we have on offer to help you make it through the weirdness and stay inspired.

Come meditate with us any week day!

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Theme music by Ackport! Used with kind permission.

#coronavirus #Covid19 #crisis #pandemic #Buddhism #Buddhist #Buddha #Dharma #Triratna #community #sangha #love #poetry #Arts #art #images #sculpture #puppetry 

To mark our latest Home Retreat, led by Tejananda, an excellent conversation and primer on meditation from a body-focussed perspective.

Tejananda's key image is of the dynamic mandala. Dharma practice is itself dynamic and transformative. And the transformation lies in gradually discovering how both we and the world are not at all what we originally supposed! Seeing this, we can begin to uproot the causes of suffering in our own experience.

This approach to practice is centred on the living energy of our body and being. Through being open to the energy of the body, and by becoming attuned to its actual nature, we’ll discover ways to integrate the stages of a spiritual path into a single, embodied experience of ‘simply being’.

Tejananda will support this Home Retreat with a series of daily meditations and inquiries, exploring in some depth the nature of our human experience.

Reserve your space on the weeklong meditation workshop now!

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Come meditate with us any week day!

Theme music by Ackport! Used with kind permission.

#meditation #mindfulness #presence #body #awareness #Covid19 #crisis #pandemic #Buddhism #Buddhist #Buddha #Dharma #Triratna #community #sangha #soma #somatic #JustSitting

For nothing is fixed,

forever, forever, forever,

it is not fixed;

the earth is always shifting,

the light is always changing,

the sea does not cease to grind down rock.

Generations do not cease to be born,

and we are responsible to them

because we are the only witnesses they have.

The sea rises, the light fails,

lovers cling to each other,

and children cling to us.

The moment we cease to hold each other,

the moment we break faith with one another,

the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

As we move into the next phase of pandemic and social crisis around the world, a changing shape for the podcast. We'll be trying some new things on for size, experimenting, hearing voices in different ways as we continue to try and bring you a sense of wider, supportive community and inspiration, whatever your context.

This episode was intended as an internal pilot for a new live series of the podcast we'll be announcing soon. But in a week of the most painful violence against black and other people of colour in the United States, it was so relevant and moving we decided to share it now...

Two good friends, Viveka and Paramananda, sparking off each other around this beautiful poem by James Baldwin, 'For Nothing Is Fixed'. Being each a deeply experienced and respected meditation teacher, their initial threads of exchange and sharing are how to live, practice and work in the body; perspectives on awakening; how to be with others energetically; matters of identity.

Soon enough, they draw each other on into a space of grace, where the amazingly complex felt experience of life as something sacred is palpable. Come and witness to something vital and affirming: a meeting of friends trying to move through the world with bliss-bestowing hands and minds and voices.

This podcast episode ends with a 2-minute meditation inspired by the space of Baldwin's poignant, resonant words.

James Baldwin's 1968 Q & A on Race in America

'I Am Not Your Negro': a film about James Baldwin

Watch James Baldwin debate William F. Buckley (1965)

James Baldwin: Pessimist, Optimist, Hero

Read more about 'For Nothing Is Fixed'

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Watch out for the live online series of Getting Real with Viveka and Paramananda, coming soon to the Dharma Toolkit.

Sign up for the Dharma Toolkit newsletter for dates of the recordings and how you can attend.

Viveka is the former Chair of the San Francisco Buddhist Center, a dynamic and popular meditation teacher and retreat leader, with profound experience in the arena of social justice work.

Paramananda from London is the founder of the San Francisco Buddhist Center, a successful author and renowned meditation teacher.

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Come meditate with us any week day!

Theme music by Ackport! Used with kind permission.

#JamesBaldwin #poetry #race #racism #BlackLivesMatter #meditation #mindfulness #presence #friendship #EngagedBuddhism #socialjustice #Covid19 #crisis #pandemic #Buddhism #Buddhist #Buddha #Dharma #Triratna #community #sangha

This year's Buddhist Action Month (BAM!) - happening around the world throughout June - is about to kick off. The theme is "For the Earth" - and here on the Dharma Toolkit we'll be looking at the intersection between urgent human issues like climate change, economic inequality and social justice.

The poetic version of this, rooted in personal and community practice, is that we have a perfect opportunity to speak up for the many beings without voices with whom we share our world. Which is also speaking up for our own future as a species. If we want to tell a new and better story about our possible future on the earth, this is the moment.

From the wild flower meadows of Vancouver Island to the slums of India and Nepal, our guests bring their steady, quiet passion and experience for work that saves lives and looks to save the environment. For all our sakes, for the earth.

BAM! is presented in conjunction with the Network of Buddhist Organisations. Check out the online events taking place online throughout the month. And get involved in your own local community!

Follow and take part in Buddhist Action Month

Buddhist Action Month on the NBO

Get the BAM! 2020 handbook

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Check out our Dharma Toolkit space for details of all we have on offer to help you make it through the weirdness and stay inspired.

Come meditate with us any week day!

Theme music by Ackport! Used with kind permission.

#BAM #BuddhistActionMonth #EngagedBuddhism #socialjustice #ecology #climate #environment #coronavirus #Covid19 #crisis #pandemic #Buddhism #Buddhist #Buddha #Dharma #Triratna #community #sangha

"Deserving a place in a realm where miracles happen"Let's start with this image: there's a river under the river. Then follow it via the works of William Stafford and the creative lives of members of the Wolf at the Door group: poets and writers exploring the interplay of modes of attention in their chosen art forms, mediated by the practice of Buddhism.

The wolf is there too. Alive and real and, sometimes, scary. But this is the true place of greater safety, and of a deeper freedom too. 

Join us for another inspiring conversation, part of our mini-series on how to access the heights and depths of experience via the Arts, myth, symbol and story.

"To be willingly fallible is a creative act in which the imagination participates."

Wolf at the Door

William Stafford on YouTube

William Stafford's poetry

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Check out our Dharma Toolkit space for details of all we have on offer to help you make it through the weirdness and stay inspired.

Come meditate with us any week day!

***

Theme music by Ackport! Used with kind permission.

#coronavirus #Covid19 #crisis #pandemic #Buddhism #Buddhist #Buddha #Dharma #Triratna #community #sangha #love #poetry #Arts #art #images #Stafford