Gaia House: Yanai Postelnik's most recent Dharma talks: Recent Episodes
via dharmaseed.org
Yanai Postelnik has been engaged in full-time dharma practice and service since 1990. He is inspired by the Thai forest tradition and nourished by time spent in nature, and has been teaching retreats around the world for over 25 years. Yanai is a member of the Guiding Teacher Council of Gaia House, in Devon, England, and of the Core Faculty of Insight Meditation Society, Massachusetts. Since 2018, Yanai has been engaged with Extinction Rebellion, seeking to bring about urgent change in the face of the climate and ecological emergency, in the service of all beings.
(Gaia House) This recording also includes walking meditation instructions with Mat Schencks.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Reflections on deepening wisdom and awakening
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Reflections on the reality of our human vulnerability and the invitation to embrace this.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) reflections on the first full day of practice
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Reflections on the power and importance of turning towards the reality of what it means that we are subject to death.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Reflections on renunciation and relinquishment
(Gaia House) Reflections on engaging with social justice issues and the climate and ecological emergency, as a natural expression of our spiritual practice.
(Gaia House) Opening to the possibility of how freedom, liberation and release can arise when we are not bound by or identified with inner and outer conditions.
(Gaia House) Guidance on turning towards what may be difficult in our experience, with care and kindness.
(Gaia House) Reflections on how living an embodied life is central to the spiritual journey, and how to find a balance between engagement and relaxation when working with the body in our practice.
(Gaia House) Instructions on practicing Insight Meditation, and a lightly guided meditation.
(Gaia House) Welcome, orienting within the retreat, short guided yoga and meditation.
This recording also includes Helen Stephenson.
(Gaia House) Asking for and offering forgiveness, for ways that we may have caused harm, or have been harmed by others.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Reflections on the climate and ecological crisiss we face, and my involvement in non-violent civil disobedance with Extintion Rebellion
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Offering care and kindness to our human bodies and the larger body of life.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Refelections on craving, aversion and the cultivation of non attachemnt, inclusivity and the wholeness of heart.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Reflection on the dharma of responding to the climate and ecological emergency with an open heart.
(Barre Center for Buddhist Studies) How practices of awakening and compassion converge with conscientiously choosing to disobey the law, in responding to the climate and ecological emergency we face.
What does dharma practice look like in the face of a Climate and Ecological emergency? How do the Buddha’s wisdom teachings and compassionate practices empower us to meet this crisis? How do we keep our heart open while engaging with our inner responses and the outer situation?
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Contemplating our body and the teaching it offers us.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Reflections on an engaged response to the climate emergency and social injustice issues as an expression of dharma practice.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Metta - Loving kindness practice for our body.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Reflections on the implications of the teaching of not-self: human dignity, preciousness, connectedness and the deathless.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Opening The Field Of Practice from reductive analysis to resonance.
(Gaia House) Instructions for sitting and walking meditation: gathering and steadying the heart-mind.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Reflections on inner and outer activism: responding to greed, hatred, and delusion in the world from a place of courageous compassion.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Reflections on renunciation and letting go as a foundation for deepening meditation practice and wellbeing.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Reflections on renunciation and letting go as a foundation for deepening practice and well-being.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Reflections on how we see through the appearance of separation and, experientially correct, with the non separate nature of life.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Reflections on the benefits of contemplating our mortality.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Reflections on the practice of meeting challenging experiences with an open heart.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) The fruition of authentic and liberating practice is revealed through our human like, but not bound by it.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Explores the potential of a wise and kindly relationship to our body and its capacity to reveal the Dharma of life
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) In seeing the quandary to want to escape our experience, we can face the truth that there is no other place to go and discover the open doorway to awakening that is here and now.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Realizing that we are an inseparable part of the vast web of life, opens our heart to a sense of deep inner connection and a life in harmony with the ways things are.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Our human heart has a great capacity to deepen in kindness and understanding - and we can learn to trust this even in the face of danger and suffering
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Offering Loving Kindness to the neutral person and to oneself.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Seeing the way things are subject to change, unable to give lasting satisfaction, and empty of inherent separate self, offers a gateway to transformation.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Practice as an entry into the wilderness.
(Gaia House) We can at times feel our hearts closed or hardened into a sense of distance, or disconnection from life. As we feel deeply into our experience, we can learn to meet our pain, fear, anger and reactivity, with acceptance, kindness, and courage. In this journey, our heart naturally begins to soften, revealing its natural sensitivity and the profoundly connected openness of our life.
(Gaia House) Inner transformation arises from a wholehearted engagement with these three primary areas of development. In living our capacity for generosity and non harming, while being mindful of and receptive to our experience in the present moment, we naturally discover the understanding that liberates dissatisfaction and reveals our inherent potential for happiness.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) A reflection on the importance and power of trusting our potential for awakening to the deepest wisdom of truth and freedom.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Recognizing the changing nature of experience and the insecurity of human existence allows us to open to the preciousness of life in this moment.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Meditation practice is an invitation to let go of the pressure we place on our life and our self to be other than as we are, and to realize the natural inherent freedom that letting go reveals.
(Gaia House) Finding the place of surrender in a wisdom tradition is to let go of our struggle with the way things are, and to allow the truth of life itself, to transform our heart and mind.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Being touched by the truth of our human vulnerability without seeking refuge in the illusion of certainties, is the gateway to a true knowing of the vast openness of life.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) This talk explores the place and power of faith "Saddha" as our capacity to rest upon the true ground of life.
(Gaia House) Meditation practice invites us to see that we are an inseparable part of the vast web of life, despite the appearance of our separate individuality. This realisation opens our heart to a sense of deep inner connection, and enables us to live in harmony and at peace with the way things are.
(Gaia House) All conditioned things turn out to be unreliable and subject to change. Recognising and accepting the truth of impermanence and the insecurity of our fluid existence allows us to let go of holding and resistance, and release our limited sense of self into the flow of life.
(Gaia House) A reflection on how to work with the challenges we all encounter in meditation. Craving, aversion, sleepiness, restlessness, and sceptical doubt are challenging but temporary visitors which obscure our deeper truth. By recognising them as such and learning to work skillfully with them we can free ourselves from their grip, revealing the natural purity and radiance of our heart and mind.
(Gaia House) This talk also includes Helen Stephenson. Meditation and yoga are natural partners in the spiritual life. This talk introduces a retreat that draws on the Buddh's teachings of mindfulness and awakening, and the yoga teachings of Patanjali, combining the practices of Hatha Yoga and Insight Meditation. The yoga on this retreat is offered as a spiritual path rather than simply an exercise system.
(Gaia House) True compassion is founded on recognising that we are not separate from others, and expresses itself as a heartfelt responsiveness, wishing to heal sufferings and contribute to the welfare and liberation of all beings.
(Gaia House) This talk looks at how we can cultivate our hearts capacity for kindness and forgiveness, as we open into a deepening friendliness towards ourselves and others.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) To deeply realize that we are inextricably a part of a vast web of life, we are invited to open to a deeper inner connection, and to recognize that we are not different to all that is around us.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Discovering how to rest in being requires us to examine the compulsive doing activity through which we seek to establish our worthiness and identity. Trusting where we are, we can come to rest in the wide-open nature of aliveness.
(Gaia House) The awakening factor of investigation moves us to look deeply into our experience, acknowledging that there is always more to understand in the simplicity and mystery of being alive here and now. As we learn to bring a deep and open-hearted curiousity to our each moment and to our very existence itself, without taking any position on our self or this world, life can open to reveal the deepest truth of freedom.
(Gaia House) Spiritual practice rests on a deep trust in the fundamental wholesomeness of our hearts seeking for happiness. We can learn to honour the goodness of our core motivation, even as we recognise our need to deepen the skill and wisdom with which we pursue genuine wellbeing. This includes recognising the importance of connecting with that which brings joy to our heart as part of our spiritual practice, and honouring our own wholsesome qualities and actions.
(Gaia House) This talk reflects on ways of practicing skillfully with mind states and emotions. These sometimes challenging areas of experience are a gateway to deepening clarity and opening the heart, when met in the present moment with understanding, acceptance and kindness.
(Gaia House) Connecting with whatever inspires us is an essential part of practice and supports a sense of heartfelt purpose and energy in meditation, expressed as ardency. Rather than 'effort-ing' in practice, born of a sense of obligation or fear, the quality of ardency through which we are moved to engage with our spiritual journey wholeheartedly, is born out of energised love and a clear commitment to what we value and hold as most important in life.
(Gaia House) In our hearts we all long to be released from the ongoing suffering inherent in unsuccessfully seeking satisfaction through sensory experience. The liberating heart of dharma is revealed when we come to rest in the realisation that what we are looking for has been right here all along.
(Gaia House) Recognising the insecurity of our life can compel us to endlessly seek control, or invite us to learn to be at ease with our vulnerability and enter it consciously as a gateway to freedom.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) A reflection on the ten paramis: generosity, non-harming, renunciation, effort, patience, truthfulness, equanimity, resolve, wisdom, loving kindness and the noble aspiration to develop them in the service of all beings.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Rather than being a distant or fearful concept, we can use the truth of death as a tonic which can revitalize our lives, and invites a deeper letting go, into that which lies beyond death.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) This talk explores establishing a wise and kind relationship with our body. This becomes the basis for discovering that the experience of body has much wisdom to reveal in the dharma of life.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Through cultivating non distractedness and non resistance the unbounded qualities of innate wakefulness and loving kindness are revealed as the radiant heart of our awakened life.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) All conditioned things turn out to be unreliable. Recognizing and accepting the truth of impermanence and insecurity allows us to let go into the vast truth of life.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) To deeply know that we are not defined by any experience or activity is to realize freedom. To recognize that we are not separate from the world is to discover compassion as our very nature. This is the fruit of true practice
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) The true meaning of life derives from what is revealed when we have the courage to adbide in unknowing. Not depending on the illusiory security of certainties we can relax into the vast open potential of life.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Working with recognizing challenging faces of mind as visitors which obscures the deeper truth, we can free our self from their grip, reveling the natural pure radiance of the heart-mind.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) The liberating heart of the dharma is revealed when we come to rest, in the realization that what we are looking for has been here all along.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Learning to let go asks us to trust in the uncontrollable fluidity of life as a medium which holds us, and in which we can open to our deepest nature, which is indestructible.
(Gaia House) What does it mean to cherish a deep vision of spiritual practice? Seeing through the beliefs that would deny or limit our spiritual potential, we can learn to trust our capacity to realise freedom right here where we are.
(Gaia House) Cultivating a gentle and steady meditative attention we can learn to meet difficulty, pain and suffering with kindness and self-forgiveness. With the courage to feel experience deeply, we can embrace our life with a tender heart of love and openness.
(Gaia House) Through meditation practice we can learn to release the pressure and demands we place on our experience to be different, and receive life just as it is. Unconditionally engaging with each moment we can awaken to innate peace and freedom.
(Gaia House) This is the opening talk for a retreat that aims to integrate the practice of meditation with the ideas and doctrines that support and illuminate such practice. This talk also includes Stephen Batchelor.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Recognizing the insecurity of our life can compel us to endlessly seek control, or invite us to learn to be at ease with our vulnerability and enter it consciously as a gateway to freedom.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) A reflection on the importance, the challenges, and the transformative power of being present.
(Gaia House) Cultivating a gentle and steady meditative attention we can learn to meet difficulty, pain and suffering with kindness and self-forgiveness. With the courage to feel experience deeply, we can embrace our life with a tender heart of love and openness.
(Gaia House) A reflection on how to work with the challenges we all encounter in meditation. by recognising craving, aversion, sloth, restlessness, and sceptical doubt as visitors which obscure our deeper truth, we can free ourselves from their grip, revealing the natural pure radiance of the heart and mind.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) An exploration of the power of seeing more deeply as the basis for wisdom and compassion to arise. This is through the understanding of non separation.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Reflections on how the wisdom of the dharma empowers us to respond creatively to the way things are. Based on a poem by a 14th century samurai warrior
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Our hearts capacity to love all beings and ourselves unconditionally, is discovered through understanding forgiveness, and the truth of interconnectedness. Freeing ourselves from fear, anger and hatred, reveals our life's capacity for a remarkable greatness of heart.
(Unknown) Opening the heart through consciously allowing ourselves to touch and be touched by all of life, including the difficult, dissolves the defensive armor of separation; this allows us to receive life's nourishment and discover true inner strength.