June 19, 2024
Leaping Into This Moment: Desire, Fear, and What Is
Saltar a Este Momento: Deseo, Miedo y Lo Que Es
This session opens with a meditation on trusting and leaping into the present moment, then moves into wide-ranging dialogues exploring the nature of consciousness and matter, the distinction between surface desires and deeper wanting, and how resistance to fear and pain creates the sense of a separate self. Recurring themes include the relationship between conditioning and freedom, the role of relationships as mirrors for practice, and the discovery that simple okayness is itself the ground of practice.
meditation
Leaping Into This Moment
An invitation to leap freshly into this moment, letting thoughts float by while discovering the quiet beauty already present in sounds, breath, and sensation.
dialogue
The Dead Fly and the Nature of Consciousness
A question about whether a dead insect is still consciousness, and what non-duality says about the boundary between life, matter, and awareness.
dialogue
Deeper Wanting and the Freedom to Say No
A question about discerning between surface-level desires and a deeper sense of what one truly wants, and how letting go of contracted self-images can reveal a more authentic direction.
dialogue
Staying and Resigning
A question about how to distinguish between a deeper impulse to stay with difficulty and the shallow urge to resign, and whether unwanted feelings can be trusted as signals.
teaching
The Art of Unconditioned Choice
A reflection on how certainty can signal conditioning, and how genuine freedom involves risk, openness, and a willingness to be wrong.
dialogue
Befriending Fear and the Deeper Calling
A question about befriending fear and pain as a doorway to freedom, and how habitual conditioning can be met with a more attuned, moment-to-moment listening.
dialogue
The Pain of Letting In
A student describes the intense, almost unbearable feeling that arises when contemplating the nondual nature of experience, and the teacher explores how resistance to love creates both pain and the sense of a separate self.
dialogue
Fear That Is Always Present
A student describes experiencing persistent fear and heart racing, and the teacher explains why this turbulence is always present and what perpetuates it.
dialogue
Not Another Conditioning
A question about what to do practically when habitual avoidance arises throughout the day, and whether the answer is simply to sit still each time.
dialogue
When Nothing Is Wrong
A student describes the experience of having no particular problem to bring up, and the teacher explores how the absence of a pressing issue reveals something important about the nature of practice.
dialogue
The Habit of Humility
A reflection on whether humility is a quality one cultivates deliberately or something that arises naturally from clear seeing.
dialogue
When Someone You Love Is Suffering
A question about how to be present with a loved one going through intense emotional pain, such as a divorce.
dialogue
The Weight of Not Knowing What to Ask
A student describes feeling stuck, unable to articulate a clear question despite a sense that something needs to be explored.
dialogue
The Vastness Beyond Control
A question about the complexity of the body's automatic processes leads to a reflection on how little we actually control, and how releasing that sense of control opens into vastness.
dialogue
The Fist and the Sensation
The teacher reflects on how the experience of effort changes when identity is no longer bound up with contraction, using the metaphor of a clenched fist to illustrate the difference between being tension and simply experiencing it.
dialogue
Sensation, Image, and the Subtle Subject
A student explores how bodily sensations and mental images sustain the sense of self, and the teacher describes how noticing these can become a practice of disidentification.