What brings us to spiritual practice? What has moved, inspired and urged you to find a clear and wholesome "other way" than feeling overrun with old reactive habit patterns of sadness, fear, attachment, anger and confusion? Samvega is the movement of the heart - an inner response towards an urgency to practice and an urgency to awaken!

Exploring a few of the difficult or afflictive states of mind that arise in our human experience...fear, anger, unwholesome desire and attachment; also exploring some of the ways the Buddha encourages us to work with them in our practice, in the light of purification and the liberation of the mind and heart.

We experience compassion as the trembling, the quivering of the heart in response to suffering…ours or that of another being. The aim of compassion practice is to gently turn the heart/mind towards suffering and then with understanding and courage open to and move towards the alleviation of suffering…with recognition, acceptance and respect in relationship to our limitations at any given time. This talk explores compassion through many different stories.

Through the looking-glass of the Dharma – looking in the mirror at myself, looking at myself looking in the mirror at myself…seeing the truth of ‘self’ – looking at myself in the mirror. Only by training oneself again and again in sensing, seeing and knowing the presently arisen thoughts, sense door experiences, feelings, mind states and perceptions as mere impersonal processes, can the power of deeply-rooted egocentric thoughts, habits and self-centered inclinations be loosened and relinquished. It’s through the actual direct experiential confrontation with the fact of ‘impersonality’ that we come to know ‘not-self’…’no-self’. And then for a moment or two, it’s not all about ME. For a moment the heart/the mind is free.