Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Dharma Sunday

Stupas are said to be a “support for enlightened mind”. How does this work? What goes into making a stupa, and why is that important for us as practitioners?

Stupas are powerful sources of support on many levels. Central to understanding why stupas are beneficial is an outlook on our practice that includes the interplay between the inner elements of our body-mind and the outer elements of appearances and other beings. Understanding how to bridge and dance between the inner and outer, we can access connate awareness and celebrate it with others. We will explore this interplay with a guided practice, and then explore how it relates to the design, construction, and activity of stupas.

The 21 Semdzin are a series of practices found in the Dzogchen Upadesha tantras, using visualization, sonification, and embodiment to release effort and rest in non-meditation.

Originally found in the “Reverberation of Sound” and the “Union of the Sun and Moon” tantras of the Upadesha class of Dzogchen, the 21 Semdzin were codified by Longchenpa in the 14th Century. Each semdzin, “lit. holding the mind” is a practice of using light, sound, and embodiment to release grasping and rest in unfabricated presence. This is the second part of a two-part series. Listen to part-one.

In Heart Advice for Practitioners, Patrul Rinpoche advises:

“Whether you practice the Dharma of sūtra, tantra, terma, or pure vision, train in every part, from beginning to the end, until you achieve confidence.”

But what is the kind of confidence that arises through Dharma practice? Is confidence the same as certainty? Does it come from accumulating information or receiving teachings?

Yukhok Chatralwa Chöying Rangdrol writes that, through “training in the power of recognition,” we can come to a “deep-seated, heartfelt confidence.” In this Dharma Sunday, Camille and Shemaleiah will explore what it may mean to cultivate this heartfelt confidence for ourselves.

What is the difference between information and knowingness? How do we move from ideas about the view toward realizing it? What does it mean to be honest and authentic? What keeps us on the path? Where do we direct our devotion? What would it be like to stop trying to attain something outside ourselves and instead belong to what is already here?

Perhaps we may discover that heartfelt confidence is not based on having answers, but on being open to the questions. We hope you will join us for this exploration.

This class combines body-oriented meditation practice with a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lesson, the brilliant sensory-motor approach to gently and wisely re-educating the neuro-muscular system. Alternating meditation, a Feldenkrais movement lesson and discussion will allow the techniques to complement and empower each other and to enhance mind-body connections and general well-being.

Many new and long-time meditators discover that Feldenkrais practices can help them feel greater physical ease and less pain, both in meditation and in everyday activities, by freeing up habitual patterns embedded in the neuromuscular system.

For this program, you will need a place to lie down and a chair to sit on. A resource handout will also be available for participants.

If you had the opportunity to devote 6 months, full time, to teaching a Dharma-inspired program for 25 special forces soldiers who might someday be in a position to start – or stop – the next world war, what would you teach them? Join Joel & Michelle Levey as they share practices and insights from their new book, A MANUAL FOR THE AWAKENING WARRIOR, revealing a glimpse of their historic, once-secret, Mind-Body-Spirit training program for the U.S. Army Green Berets, supported by Kalu Rinpoche and many other Dharma teachers. 

This talk highlights the Buddha’s teaching about harm doing—how to understand it and relate to wisely it in our own life and Buddhist practice.

In what ways do we minimize the harm we have done, or exaggerate it? In what ways do  we confuse our own distress as others’, or vice versa?

In this talk we will cover what the Buddha offered as wisdom in relation to harmdoing, recovery from harm being done to, or by, us and adjustments we can make in our perspectives to have more confidence that our future actions will be harmless to life. We will specifically explore how the perfections of character (Paramitas) can be seen as corrections to our tendencies towards harm-doing.

Lama will continue his teaching on The Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva (Tibetan: Gyalse Laklen Sorma), which is a famous 14th-century Mahayana text composed by the Tibetan scholar and monk Gyalse Tokme Zangpo. It serves as a practical, step-by-step guide for cultivating compassion, wisdom, and the awakening mind (bodhicitta) to ultimately benefit all sentient beings. All are welcome – no prerequisites.

Here is the link to The Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva he will be teaching about.

We will spend this Dharma Sunday in the company of the women who first fought to be included in the audience when Buddha taught. Damchö will narrate that little known story, opening spaces for collective reflection on its implications for the seat women take in Dharma communities today.

We might imagine that Buddha’s teachings were directed to all people from the beginning, but that is not the case. Sanskrit sources contain a detailed account of the interventions that women needed to make in order to be able to receive the Dharma from the Buddha. Drawing on material she encountered during research for her doctoral dissertation, Damcho will narrate that story, opening spaces for collective reflection on its implications for the seat women take in Dharma communities today.

Dharma Sunday | The 21 Semdzin Online Event With Lama Karma Justin Wall July 19, 2026 The 21 Semdzin are a series of practices found in the Dzogchen Upadesha tantras, using visualization, sonification, and embodiment to release effort and rest in non-meditation. Originally found in the “Reverberation of Sound” and the “Union of the Sun and Moon” tantras of the Upadesha class of Dzogchen, the 21 Semdzin were codified by Longchenpa in the 14th Century. Each semdzin, “lit. holding the mind” is a practice of using light, sound, and embodiment to release grasping and rest in unfabricated presence. This will be the first of a two-part series.

The Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva (Tibetan: Gyalse Laklen Sorma) is a famous 14th-century Mahayana text composed by the Tibetan scholar and monk Gyalse Tokme Zangpo. It serves as a practical, step-by-step guide for cultivating compassion, wisdom, and the awakening mind (bodhicitta) to ultimately benefit all sentient beings.

Tongxuan: Both wisdom and ignorance have a non-dual nature, but what is the nature of nonduality?

Wansong: Even at dawn, it’s not revealed.

Linquan: Even at dawn it’s not revealed, Like dragons howling in misty places. By not relying on words, Opportunities to pivot are forever intersecting. Sunlight is about to rise over the ocean, Just as a cloudy haze seems to conceal it.

Join Lama Willa Baker and the online sangha of Natural Dharma Fellowship for a morning of teaching, prayer, contemplation, meditation practice, and community. Not by the book, Willa’s Dharma Sundays reflect what is most immediately and spontaneously on her heartmind. Time is allotted at the end of every Sunday session for audience participation, questions and reflections. Bring your curiosity, questions and insights.

Written (or discovered) in 1968, the Sadhana of Mahamudra is more relevant now than it has ever been. This long prayer, which includes some of the most poetic descriptions of devotion, longing and awakening in English, is available to meditation students both new and old.

Combining the realization of the Kagyu and the Nyingma schools of Tibetan Buddhism, the Sadhana of Mahamudra emerged at a time of revolution and tumult. The author, Trungpa Rinpoche, was struggling to find a way to connect his deep training in Tibetan Buddhism with the modern world. This sadhana was his answer.

Please join us this Sunday for a discussion of the Sadhana of Mahamudra, and then a group practice session. Most sadhanas are not available without finishing preliminary practices, but in this case the lineage holder has given us permission to do this practice at NDF.

As the poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.”

Within our practice traditions, there is sacred technology that helps us touch into the fertile darkness of Prajna Paramita. We will explore these practices together in support of resiliency. This then helps us to navigate in seasons of collective groundlessness.

In the rapidly, ever-evolving world of artificial intelligence, humanity is faced with a myriad of views about what constitutes “intelligence,” consciousness, and the risks of AI. How can the Dharma inform this conversation, and how might mindfulness, insight, and wisdom help us cultivate “right understanding” in the face of these technologies? In the rapidly, ever-evolving world of artificial intelligence, humanity is faced with a myriad of views about what constitutes “intelligence,” consciousness, and the risks of AI. This talk and discussion will explore how the Dharma can inform this conversation, and how mindfulness, insight, and wisdom might help us cultivate “right understanding” in the face of these technologies.

Join Lama Willa Baker and the online sangha of Natural Dharma Fellowship for a morning of teaching, prayer, contemplation, meditation practice, and community. Not by the book, Willa’s Dharma Sundays reflect what is most immediately and spontaneously on her heartmind. 

Awakening is not something we achieve; it is something we recognize. Yet subtle patterns of mind and identity obscure what is already present. In this experiential workshop, we explore what stands in the way of direct recognition and how it can naturally fall away.

Many traditions describe awakening as a kind of remembering, recognizing what has always been here. If this is true, what prevents us from seeing it?

In this workshop, we turn our attention to the subtle ways the sense of separation is maintained: patterns of thought, emotional conditioning, and unconscious identification. Rather than trying to fix or transcend them, we explore how seeing them clearly allows them to soften and release.

Through guided inquiry and shared exploration, we begin to uncover the ever-present awareness that is not separate from our experience, but is the ground of it.

This is a deeply experiential session using Collective Interactive Meditation, a method that brings insight alive through direct, shared exploration.

In just four lines, the Seven Branch Prayer contains the condensed essence of the Buddhist path. Please see the Seven Branch Prayer file attached to the confirmation email you will receive after you submit your registration. Natural Dharma Fellowship’s Dharma Sundays are donation-based gatherings open to all, offering a wide range of topics. Led by highly trained NDF Dharma and guest teachers, these live, interactive sessions include guided meditation, teachings, and time for questions and discussion. Please join us to settle into the support of sangha and the joy of practicing together.

Join Lama Willa Baker and the online sangha of Natural Dharma Fellowship for a morning of teaching, prayer, contemplation, meditation practice, and community. Not by the book, Willa’s Dharma Sundays reflect what is most immediately and spontaneously on her heartmind. Time is allotted at the end of every Sunday session for audience participation, questions and reflections.

Natural Dharma Fellowship’s Dharma Sundays are donation-based gatherings open to all, offering a wide range of topics. Led by highly trained NDF Dharma and guest teachers, these live, interactive sessions include guided meditation, teachings, and time for questions and discussion. Please join us to settle into the support of sangha and the joy of practicing together.

Prison Dharma: Buddhist perspectives and practices for developing inner peace independent from outer context.

In the Buddha’s first teaching, he named the forms of suffering that define the human condition, two of which are the pain of being separated from what we love and the stress of being forced to associate with what we loathe. This talk draws from years of experience working within the correctional system, with people from widely varying backgrounds all needing to cope with their powerlessness over their surroundings. We will explore several meditative and reflective techniques that are effective in meeting the presence of dukkha and our own unskillfulness with a steady heart, moving toward a practice of radical acceptance without reactivity.

On this Dharma Sunday, we explore how our inner expression of innate creativity is mirrored everywhere in the natural world. Asking if creative expression is the fundamental movement of life itself, we can develop our path of awakening, of remembering who we really are, as a growing sensitivity to how we inhabit each and every moment. Can we discover how to step aside from constructing a fabricated life out of a desire to control and instead relax into a profound participation with the creative flow of existence? This Forest Teaching will delve into these questions and more, seeking to open new ways of being and connecting to our deepest wholeness.

What if imagination isn’t mere fantasy, but a doorway into profound spiritual reality? Join us for an exploration of how three great wisdom traditions—Jungian depth psychology, Sufi mysticism, and Vajrayana Buddhism—understand the transformative power of visionary experience.

We’ll journey through Carl Jung’s discovery of archetypes of the collective unconscious during his personal crisis, Ibn al-Arabi’s teachings on the alam al-mithal (the imaginal realm between spirit and matter), and the Vajrayana understanding of sambhogakaya—the dimension of luminous appearance where deities arise. Through stories of these masters’ own visionary breakthroughs and guided contemplative exercises, we’ll discover how imagination serves as a genuine organ of spiritual perception.

Whether you’re new to meditation or an experienced practitioner, this talk offers practical insights for deepening your own contemplative life. Discover how archetypes, imaginal forms, and deity visualization point toward the same profound truth: mind and reality are not separate, and imagination is the bridge that reveals their unity.

What does it mean to learn from a teacher, and how does that relationship support awakening? In this hour-long dharma talk, we’ll explore the role of the teacher–student relationship in spiritual practice—its possibilities, challenges and ethical foundations. 

Drawing on traditional teachings and contemporary perspectives, the talk will reflect on the role of discernment, trust, inner wisdom, responsibility and agency in cultivating a relationship with a teacher or teachers. 

We will also consider the breadth of what “teacher” means in an Eastern context, as a principal that permeates our outer, inner and innermost world, how being a student is a practice of taking life itself as our teacher.

This special meditation session will focus on weaving together a profound blend of practices inspired by Longchenpa’s three excellences, along with other potent methods for awakening the special kind of courage, compassion, and spiritual strength needed in these challenging times.

These perilous times challenge us all to source new depths of spiritual strength, wisdom, compassion, inspiration, and courage.

This special meditation session will focus on weaving together a profound blend of practices inspired by Longchenpa’s three excellences, along with other potent methods for awakening the special kind of courage, compassion, and spiritual strength needed in these challenging times.

Insight will also be drawn from the Leveys’ new book – Manual for the Awakening Warrior – which explores how these practices meet the real world of activism, social justice, and courageous earth stewarding for the benefit of all.  (See: http://WisdomAtWork.com/LeveysAwakeningWarrior/)

The terms “Awakening” and “Realization” are used in many different ways and are often interchangeable. Join us to explore all the angles, all the while striving to maintain plausible deniability.

Beyond the embarrassment that “Enlightenment” is something we in fact can have no idea about, the terms “Awakening” and “Realization” are used in many different ways in many different paths. We will examine these notions from different angles, with examples from traditional frameworks found in the Mahayana Sutras, the Five Paths, the Four Yogas of Mahamudra, and the Three Words of Garab Dorje.

This class combines body-oriented meditation practice with a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lesson, the brilliant sensory-motor approach to gently and wisely re-educating the neuro-muscular system. Alternating meditation, a Feldenkrais movement lesson and discussion will allow the techniques to complement and empower each other and to enhance mind-body connections and general well-being.

Many new and long-time meditators discover that Feldenkrais practices can help them feel greater physical ease and less pain, both in meditation and in everyday activities, by freeing up habitual patterns embedded in the neuromuscular system.

For this program, you will need a place to lie down and a chair to sit on. A resource handout will also be available for participants.

What does it mean to become truly present and why does it matter? In this midday Sunday session, we will explore radical presence, a state of being that understands that there is only–and only ever will be–the here and now. To enter radical presence means to grapple with how we self-exile: all the ways we absence our body, parts of our world, and even our life itself. 

We will consider how returning to the body, the moment and all the conditions of our life begins to restore a reliable refuge that has always been here, an eternal version of time. 

Natural Dharma Fellowship’s Dharma Sundays are donation-based gatherings open to all, offering a wide range of topics. Led by highly trained NDF Dharma and guest teachers, these live, interactive sessions include guided meditation, teachings, and time for questions and discussion. Please join us to settle into the support of sangha and the joy of practicing together.

Natural Dharma Fellowship’s Dharma Sundays are donation-based gatherings open to all, offering a wide range of topics. Led by highly trained NDF Dharma and guest teachers, these live, interactive sessions include guided meditation, teachings, and time for questions and discussion. Please join us to settle into the support of sangha and the joy of practicing together.

“This suffering is a matter not just of empathy but also of material interdependence.”

Space, Alive: The amniotic fluid in which we learn to float. Our shared medium with all beings. Each aggregation always different, unique. Aggregations of aggregations, of aggregations affecting one another across “universes” “internal” and “external”…boundless. Pulsing.

On this Dharma Sunday, and as we prepare to step into the New Year, we will explore the power of light to remind us of who we really are, and to return us to an immersion in loving awareness as a source for renewed activity and care in the world. Join Lama Liz for this fifth installation of the Forest Teachings, a series of offerings exploring different avenues through which we can transform our lives into compassionate, fierce, and wise expressions of our interconnectedness with the living world and the cosmos from which we come.

Natural Dharma Fellowship’s Dharma Sundays are donation-based gatherings open to all, offering a wide range of topics. Led by highly trained NDF Dharma and guest teachers, these live, interactive sessions include guided meditation, teachings, and time for questions and discussion. Please join us to settle into the support of sangha and the joy of practicing together.

Join Lama Willa Baker and the online sangha of Natural Dharma Fellowship for a morning of teaching, prayer, contemplation, meditation practice, and community. Not by the book, Willa’s Dharma Sundays reflect what is most immediately and spontaneously on her heartmind. Time is allotted at the end of every Sunday session for audience participation, questions and reflections. Bring your curiosity, questions and insights.

Freedom is part of our practice. We cultivate the roots of our practice to remind ourselves and each other that this is the best time to practice.

Roots are the foundation that ground plants in the soil. So too, as we ground ourselves with the source of freedom that our Buddhist practice offers, we embody the underlying support that allows us to be a refuge in these turbulent times for ourselves and for each other.

This Dharma Sunday explores part IV of Forest Teachings. Join us as we explore the intersection between meditation on the nature of mind through the lens of deep ecology in practice. Such a merging invites us to recover our forgotten intimacy with the living world. Deep ecology has long called for a shift in consciousness, while meditation enacts such a shift through recognition of who we really are, revealing that the luminous self and world are one. To awaken our innate nature is to remember who we truly are — the earth aware of itself, the cosmos knowing itself through the human form.

Darkness practice is one of the most powerful methods for stripping away the conceptual veils covering our luminous buddha nature. Practiced in many spiritual traditions across the world, dark retreat is a deeply cherished tradition in a number of Tibetan Buddhist lineages surviving today. We will introduce some aspects of darkness practice, with an eye towards personal practice in the future. Please bring a sleep mask, blindfold, or prepare a space of relative darkness.

This Dharma Sunday will explore Rupa-Bhavana, the cultivation of embodiment. This practice, one of the five cultivation categories taught by the Buddha, focuses on techniques to develop greater discernment, capacity, and balanced sensitivity regarding our felt experience.

Join Lama Willa Baker and the online sangha of Natural Dharma Fellowship for a morning of teaching, prayer, contemplation, meditation practice, and community. Not by the book, Willa’s Dharma Sundays reflect what is most immediately and spontaneously on her heartmind. Time is allotted at the end of every Sunday session for audience participation, questions and reflections. Bring your curiosity, questions and insights.

On this hybrid Dharma Sunday, we will continue exploring what it means to cultivate our innate capacity to relax into beingness with the energies of the phenomenal world. How we approach a renewed engagement with the more-than-human world can have a significant effect on our recognition and embodiment of innate inseparability. Through what kinds of skillful means can we invite the kind of connection that transforms, awakens, and reminds us of who we really are? Join Lama Liz as we investigate transformative approaches to practicing into wholeness.

In his sublime meditation manual Mahamudra the Ocean of Definitive Meaning, the Ninth Karmapa briefly describes a four-step analysis for cutting through the illusion of a separate external reality presenting itself to sense perception. This session will examine the four steps and draw on insights from current cognitive philosophy and physics to offer a simple but powerful approach to challenge the basic mistake that incites mental afflictions.

Join Lama Willa Baker and the online sangha of Natural Dharma Fellowship for a morning of teaching, prayer, contemplation, meditation practice, and community. Not by the book, Willa’s Dharma Sundays reflect what is most immediately and spontaneously on her heartmind. Time is allotted at the end of every Sunday session for audience participation, questions and reflections. Bring your curiosity, questions and insights.

In this Dharma Sunday, we’ll learn strategies for meditating so that our practice doesn’t reactivate trauma symptoms, based on David Trelevean’s groundbreaking book Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness. This session will be helpful both for trauma survivors and for anyone experiencing dysregulation, overwhelm, disorientation, or a loss of agency. The instructor will cover the Window of Tolerance and Polyvagal Theory, with some review of Somatic Experiencing and nervous system resets. The workshop includes practicing techniques together to support stability and healing.

This Dharma Sunday session begins with a Refuge Prayer and a guided meditation that grounds the body and expands into open awareness. Lama Liz then dives into the core question: How do we return to our true nature? She challenges the modern materialist mentality and explores how to move beyond the contracted "self" to access a vaster field of interbeing—the ancient, interconnected source that redefines our relationship with the living world.

The “Four Empowerments” characterize the essence of the tantric Buddhist path. We will explore the internal structure of these four initiations and how we can relate with them as practitioners. Central to this exploration is the idea that initiation is an organic part of human experience. What seems esoteric, foreign, and unknown, is from another perspective natural and genuine. We will explore these tensions and also discuss initiation as a perennial human rite of passage. 

The Dharma Sunday session begins with guided meditation practices followed by a teaching on eco-Dharma and the concept of becoming a disciple of Gaia. Lama Willa explores how environmental issues have become a critical focus in the present moment and proposed expanding the traditional Buddhist concept of taking refuge to include Gaia as a teacher. The session concludes with discussions on deep listening to nature, the importance of slowing down in a fast-paced world, and the need for dialogue between activists and spiritual practitioners to address ecological and spiritual crises.

This Dharma Sunday teaching combines body-oriented meditation practice with a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement® lesson, the brilliant sensory-motor approach to gently and wisely re-educating the neuro-muscular system. Alternating meditation, a Feldenkrais movement lesson and discussion will allow the techniques to complement and empower each other and to enhance mind-body connections and general well-being.