Dharma Sunday

The Veils of Awakening With Santiago Santai Jimenez

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.

The Seven Branch Prayer with Lama Gursam

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.

Resistance to Practice: Meeting What Seems to Get in the Way With Lama Willa

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.

The Karma of Forgotten Stories With JD Doyle

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.

Meeting the Unloved: A Prison Chaplain's Perspective on Radical Acceptance With Kyira Korrigan

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.

Pure Motivation: Understanding Its Importance in Buddha Dharma With Lama Gursam

Forest Teachings, Part V: What the Sky Paints - Discovering Life as Innate Expression with Lama Liz

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.

Creative Imagination and the Imaginal in Jung, the Sufis, and the Vajrayana with Ron Thomas

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.

The Teacher-Student Relationship with Lama Willa

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.

Sitting in the Fire and Finding the Light: Sourcing a Special Kind of Courage to Meet these Perilous Times with Joel and Michelle Levey

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/)

Don't Quote Me on This: What's the Difference between Experience, Awakening, and Realization? with Lama Karma

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.

Relaxed and Awake: The Feldenkrais Method and Somatic Meditation with Dan Clurman

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.