Trudy Goodman introduces listeners to the Brahmavihārās through an affectionate breath practice and a loving-kindness body scan.

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This week on the BHNN Guest Podcast, Buddhist teacher Trudy Goodman explores:

• The Brahmavihārās: love, compassion, joy and equanimity
• Re-parenting ourselves through practice
• The feeling of being soothed, comforted, and safety
• Offering loving kindness to our body
• Gratitude for the breath and all it does to support us
• The breath as a river of blessings that is always here for us
• How the Brahmavihārās infuse and suffuse our being
• A loving-kindness body scan

About Trudy Goodman:

Trudy is a Vipassana teacher in the Theravada lineage and the Founding Teacher of InsightLA. For 25 years, in Cambridge, MA, Trudy practiced mindfulness-based psychotherapy with children, teenagers, couples and individuals. Trudy conducts retreats and workshops worldwide.

Learn more about Trudy’s offerings at trudygoodman.com

This recording was originally published on Dharmaseed

You will notice that the breath is so exquisitely attuned. When we’re upset we tend to breath rapidly. When we’re at peace the breath slows down. We don’t have to do anything. This is one of the ways we are loved and supported by the breath. You don’t have to make it happen, you don’t have to create it.” – Trudy Goodman

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Through meditation and lecture, Gil Fronsdal outlines how the awareness of awareness is more important than the content of an experience.

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This time on the BHNN Guest Podcast, Gil Fronsdal explains:

• Giving too much importance to our experiences
• Being mindful of whatever is present in a given moment
• The authority we give to our fixations
• Dropping into the experience of the body breathing
• Knowing our feelings and thoughts and noticing when we are distracted
• A guided mediation from Gil to develop awareness of awareness

About Gil Fronsdal:

Gil Fronsdal is the co-teacher for the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California; he has been teaching since 1990. He has practiced Zen and Vipassana in the U.S. and Asia since 1975. He was a Theravada monk in Burma in 1985, and in 1989 began training with Jack Kornfield to be a Vipassana teacher. Gil teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center where he is part of its Teachers Council. Gil was ordained as a Soto Zen priest at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1982, and in 1995 received Dharma Transmission from Mel Weitsman, the abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center. He currently serves on the SF Zen Center Elders’ Council. In 2011 he founded IMC’s Insight Retreat Center. Gil has an undergraduate degree in agriculture from U.C. Davis where he was active in promoting the field of sustainable farming. In 1998 he received a PhD in Religious Studies from Stanford University studying the earliest developments of the bodhisattva ideal. He is the author of The Issue at Hand, essays on mindfulness practice; A Monastery Within; a book on the five hindrances called Unhindered; and the translator of The Dhammapada, published by Shambhala Publications. You may listen to Gil’s talks on Audio Dharma.

“In some ways, it doesn’t matter that much where you bring your attention, what matters is that you’re using it. You can develop just as much clarity of mind and presence of mind on the rain sound as you can on your breathing, as you can on almost anything.” – Gil Fronsdal

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Sharing her recent near-death experience, Trudy Goodman explains how and why dharma practice is essential to facing death without fear.

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This time on the BHNN Guest Podcast, Buddhist teacher Trudy Goodman shares:

• How even slivers of wisdom light up our life
• Her personal story of a near-death experience and choosing to live
• The imminence of death and knowing it can come at any time
• The extraordinary opportunity it is to be born
• The value in each moment we are aware
• The way that life takes care of life
• Learning to rest and not push
• Freedom from surrendering to the way things are
• How who we are is more important than what we do
• The way that pain concentrates the mind and tests our practice
• Appreciating all of the little moments that act as dharma doorways

This recording was originally published on Dharmaseed

About Trudy Goodman:

Trudy is a Vipassana teacher in the Theravada lineage and the Founding Teacher of InsightLA. For 25 years, in Cambridge, MA, Trudy practiced mindfulness-based psychotherapy with children, teenagers, couples and individuals. Trudy conducts retreats and workshops worldwide.

“Who we are is more important than what we do. It just is. It’s really true that just being alive is a gift, even though there are moments when it doesn’t feel like that.” – Trudy Goodman

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Gil Fronsdal offers Buddhist wisdom on relating skillfully to our emotions and seeing them as messengers of our inner worlds.

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In this talk, Gil Fronsdal lectures about:

• Identifying emotions without getting lost in the story
• The necessity and benefits of feeling pain
• Knowing what's happening as it's happening
• How most of us are driven by our desires and aversions
• Simply knowing and how free our knowing can be
• Making room for our experiences
• How our emotions let us know what we should pay attention to
• Learning how our emotions live in the intelligent system of our body
• How reactivity blocks us from processing emotions
• Being in our body and allowing processes to unfold

“One of the primary functions of emotions is to let us know something is important. They’re knocking on the door of our capacity to know. They are not accidents, they’re not incidental, they’re not annoyances, they’re not unfortunate. They’re actually a very important form of which your inner life is presenting itself to you.” – Gil Fronsdal

This talk was originally published on Dharmaseed

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Professor and Investigator Dr. Quevedo is hosted by Jackie Dobrinska for a philosophical talk on interrelation and psychedelic therapies.

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In this episode, Dr. Sylvestre Quevedo and Jackie Dobrinska explore:

• The qualities of love within the heart
• How the chemical components of MDMA aid in social bonding and heart-opening
• Touching into transcendent realms and the divine
• The importance of our worldviews
• Navigating difficult experiences when using plant medicine
• Turning to sacred texts to glean understanding
• Ram Dass’ perspectives on psychedelics
• How the Bhagavad Gita can help us
• The Indigenous 7 generation teaching
• The efficacy of MDMA in PTSD treatment
• Awareness and appreciation for nature
• The importance of community and being in connection
• The uses of psychedelics beyond the medical model

This conversation was recorded as part of the Ram Dass Explorer’s club. To learn more and sign up to join a Ram Dass fellowship gathering near you, visit RamDass.org/Fellowship.

About Dr. Sylvestre Quevedo:

Sylvestre Quevedo is currently Associate Professor of Medicine at UCSF and a Principal Investigator in an FDA trial of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies and UCSF. He earned his medical degree at the Harvard Medical School and a Master of Public Health degree at Harvard School of Public Health. After postdoctoral training in family and community medicine at the University of Arizona, he spent four years developing community health center programs in underserved communities in Colorado, Washington and California. He returned to postdoctoral education with studies in law and public policy at the Stanford Law School, followed by internal medicine at Stanford and a fellowship in nephrology and medicine at Stanford University Medical Center, where he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar.

Learn more about Dr. Quevedo HERE.

About Jackie Dobrinska:

Jackie Dobrinska is the Director of Education, Community & Inclusion for Ram Dass’ Love, Serve, Remember Foundation and the current host of Ram Dass’ Here & Now podcast. She is also a teacher, coach, and spiritual director with the privilege of marrying two decades of mystical studies with 15 years of expertise in holistic wellness. As an inter-spiritual minister, Jackie was ordained in Creation Spirituality in 2016 and has also studied extensively in several other lineages – the plant-medicine-based Pachakuti Mesa Tradition, Sri Vidya Tantra, Western European Shamanism, Christian Mysticism, the Wise Woman Tradition, and others. Today, in addition to building courses and community for LSRF, she leads workshops and coaches individuals to discover, nourish and live from their most authentic selves.

“The defining characteristic of a medicine carrier is his/her relationship with the medicine. These are not just chemicals or herbs, these are sentient beings that you’re in communication with.” – Dr. Sylvestre Quevedo

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In a stimulating talk on reincarnation, ego-death, and other dimensions, renowned Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee bridges this world and the next.

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This week, teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee returns to explore:

• The unknowable essence of death
• Lessons and instructions from the Upanishads
• Dying to the ego before we die to this physical world
• The transcendent dimension of our own being
• Having choice in the afterlife if one transcends their ego in their life
• How relationships with spiritual teachers can last lifetime after lifetime
• Reincarnation and unfinished spiritual lessons
• Journeying through other dimensions
• Death as a friend and destination
• How easy it is to be caught in the distortions of the world
• Learning the lessons of our individual souls
• Being surrounded by an all-embracing light

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 further one travels along the spiritual path, the more life and death are intertwined. The mystery for me has always been how life covers over so much of our true nature, which

death reveals.” – Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

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