This week, Buddhist Teacher Gil Fronsdal explores our quality of well-being and how we can cultivate ease, happiness, and contentment on the path to inner liberation.

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In this talk on cultivating well-being through Buddhist practice, Gil touches on:

• Happiness as something we do not pursue, but cultivate by creating and recognizing conditions for it
• The “three breath journey” meditation practice, which helps to shift perception and be present
• Developing clarity and ease through mindfulness practice
• Transforming challenging emotions and experiences by befriending them non-judgmentally
• Physical presence and awareness in the body as a part of cultivating well-being
• Experimenting with different mindfulness techniques to find what brings you joy and ease

“We create the conditions for happiness, and we learn to recognize the conditions that bring it forth. But we try not to be the cause of happiness, but we are cultivating happiness and well-being.” – Gil Fronsdal

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Describing the man-made wall between humans and divinity, Llewellyn reminds us of our own divine nature and how to access the light.

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In this episode, returning guest teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee discusses:

• “The Wall” between ourselves and the Divine
• The spiritual merging of the lover with the beloved
• Separation as a consequence of human consciousness
• Llewellyn’s book, Darkening of the Light
• The slow process of spiritual life and lifting the veil
• The wall that has been built between humans and divine
• How Christianity eradicated pagan beliefs and strengthened the wall between worlds
• Communism and capitalism as the twin demons of the world
• Accessing the light through our higher spiritual centers
• Going beyond the world rather than dismantling it
• Re-learning how to be sincere, responsible, and open
• Our shared evolution and a better, possible future

About Llewellyn:

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Ph.D. is a Sufi teacher in the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Sufi Order. He is the author of Sufism, the Transformation of the Heart, and the founder of The Golden Sufi Center. Check out his new podcast Working With Oneness.

“The Sufis describe how we need a separation between the worlds, 70 veils of light and darkness or the glories of his face would burn away everything. As I know from my own experience, the light of the divine is too dazzling to perceive it directly. Its energy is too strong. This is one of the reasons why spiritual life is a slow process, a gradual lifting of the veils as one develops spiritual strength, becomes more and more able to bear the light.” – Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

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Reflecting on the inevitable truth of suffering, JoAnna Hardy explains what we do have jurisdiction over: our action, speech and mind.

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This time on the BHNN Guest Podcast, JoAnna Hardy explains:

• Recognizing the first noble truth of suffering all around us
• Breaking down what we cannot control in life
• How resistance toward the inevitable causes suffering
• Reflecting on our ability to control our internal world (priorities, attitudes, etc.)
• How our speech and actions are in our jurisdiction
• Cultivating a wise, steady, and skillful heart and mind
• The mind as our sixth sense
• The way we latch on to the stories we tell ourselves
• How one mind-state can feed into another
• Retraining the phenomena of our habits
• The relief we can feel when we let go of what we cannot control

About JoAnna Hardy:

JoAnna Hardy is an insight meditation (Vipassanā) practitioner and teacher; she is on faculty at the University of Southern California, a meditation trainer at Apple Fitness+, a founding member of the Meditation Coalition, a teacher’s council member at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, a visiting retreat teacher at Insight Meditation Society, and a collaborator on many online meditation Apps and programs. Her greatest passion is to teach meditation in communities that are dedicated to seeing the truth of how racism, gender inequality and oppression go hand in hand with the compassionate action teachings in Buddhism and related perspectives to social and racial justice.

This recording was originally published on Dharmaseed.org

“When we sit here and deeply pay attention to this process of the mind, it’s so fascinating. What is under my control, what can I control? Pay attention every time you have a mind moment to what you do with it and to it, and how you hold it, and what you decide your next mind moment is going to be.” – JoAnna Hardy

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