A new podcast from The Buddhist Centre, with good company to help you through the weeks or months ahead in these extraordinary coronavirus times. Dharma inspiration when you need it most!

www.thebuddhistcentre.com/toolkit

The Buddhist Centre Podcast

We're on the road this week with a festive episode of the podcast to celebrate Vidyamala: the extraordinary inspiration behind Breathworks who has just been made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Queen’s Birthday 2022 Honours List. She has been honoured for her Services to Wellbeing and Pain Management as Co-founder of Breathworks, an organisation which teaches mindfulness-based approaches to people coping with pain, illness and stress.

In a riot of birdsong, on a beautiful day in early summer, we were delighted to be able to join Vidyamala in her garden just after the news broke, along with her partner Sona, and her friend Aryajaya. As well as marking the occasion, we remember the very hard road travelled through pain that led to the foundation of Breathworks and its vital contribution to the welfare of so many people. 

Having passed on her wisdom to over 600 accredited trainers in 35 countries, Vidyamala's work isn't "just mindfulness"—it's now a whole transformative movement capable of reaching deep into society. In Vidyamala's approach the simple application of awareness and kindness becomes an emotionally intelligent and deeply responsive re-imagining of the Buddhist path itself, ready to meet the huge challenges of suffering in the 21st Century. Vidyamala has brought this beautiful work to bear in her own life with great courage, grace and equanimity, opening up portals to freedom in hearts and minds all around the world.

Show notes
Visit Breathworks: https://www.breathworks-mindfulness.org.uk

See Breathwork's Mindfulness for Managing Long Covid Course:
www.breathworks-mindfulness.org.uk/mindfulness-for-managing-long-covid

Read more about Vidyamala's OBE: https://thebuddhistcentre.com/news/vidyamala-honoured-queen

Listen to Vidyamala on this podcast back in March 2020: The Blue Sky at the Heart of the Body: https://audioboom.com/posts/7544500-the-blue-sky-at-the-heart-of-the-body-the-dharma-toolkit-daily-episode-7

Visit Vidyamala's personal website:
https://www.vidyamala-burch.com

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Visit The Buddhist Centre Live (events year-round on Buddhism, mindfulness, meditation, and culture): thebuddhistcentre.com/live

Come meditate with us online any week day!
thebuddhistcentre.com/stories/toolkit/meditation/

Theme music by Ackport! Used with kind permission.
https://soundcloud.com/rascal-press/06-make-room-for-fun

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Vidyamala, OBE! (The Buddhist Centre Podcast, Episode 432)

Welcome to The Dharma Toolkit Daily, our new podcast from The Buddhist Centre to keep you company through the weeks or months ahead in these extraordinary coronavirus times. 

We'll be with you every week day with a diverse range of guests and voices to renew your sense of a wider Dharma community standing with you. What better way to stay connected than to hear the voices of friends and strangers who understand something of what you may be going through in your particular lockdown situation?

In our pilot episode, you'll hear tales and impressions from Scotland, Ireland, England, Mexico and the U.S.A. The strangeness of physical loneliness alongside too many Zoom calls; the positive effect on the natural world of less human presence; the surprising normalcy of meditating online; the deep need for community, beyond the boundaries of language itself; the collective versus the individual; the consequences of a cancelled long-term retreat; and, of course, the great reality of interconnectedness.

Join us for 30 minutes of great conversation!

Check out our Dharma Toolkit space for details of all we have on offer to help you make it through the weirdness and stay inspired.

Come meditate with us any week day!

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Theme music by Ackport! Used with kind permission:
https://soundcloud.com/rascal-press/06-make-room-for-fun

Follow the podcast

Turning Towards Uncertain Times (The Dharma Toolkit Daily, Episode 1)

Today's episode brings friends together from Ireland, England and the USA to look at the very technology that connect us for use in things like this. Come and get meta with us about Zoom!

With the launch of our daily meditations we discuss how better versions of the Internet and its underlying technologies mean an evolution – and possibly a revolution – in how we conceive of Buddhist practice (and everything else) in community. 

What does a mature web context for practice look like on its own terms? How might going on retreat work online? In exploring all this we shine a light on the unexpected experience of intimacy to be had with people who come to classes online looking to create and be open to a genuine depth of connection. 

We also gather some favourite cultural highlights from the past week around the corona web. Things to cheer the heart! Featuring:

Samuel West's free daily readings of poetry on Soundcloud
Laura Marling's guitar lessons on Instagram
Rufus Wainwright's daily songs on Instagram
Adrian Tchaikovsky's free eBooks via Twitter
Marco Polo app

Join us for 30 minutes of great conversation!

Check out our Dharma Toolkit space for details of all we have on offer to help you make it through the weirdness and stay inspired.

Come meditate with us any week day!

***

Theme music by Ackport! Used with kind permission: 
https://soundcloud.com/rascal-press/06-make-room-for-fun


#coronoavirus #Covid19 #Buddhism #Buddhist #Buddha #Dharma #Triratna #community #sangha

The Unexpected Intimacy Of Online (The Dharma Toolkit Daily, Episode 2)

A perfectly formed wee diamond of an episode featuring response and analysis from someone who knows what it's like at the sharp end of working with viruses in a laboratory setting.

Danabhadri is our guest today, helping us move past the clinical language of "quarantines" and "isolation" towards a practical experience of interconnectedness. Evoking beautifully why that matters, she says:

"The virus is not the monster from the deep. It evolved on this planet the same way we did." 

Hers is an urgent, challenging, ultimately empathetic perspective that embraces seeing our species as interdependent in ways that can mean we as individuals take a step away from horrified anxiety, opening up to a positive relationship to mortality itself.

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Check out our Dharma Toolkit space for details of all we have on offer to help you make it through the weirdness and stay inspired.

Come meditate with us any week day!

***

Theme music by Ackport! Used with kind permission: https://soundcloud.com/rascal-press/06-make-room-for-fun

A Scientist's Tale (The Dharma Toolkit Daily, Episode 3)

"What went before — let go of that!
All that's to come — have none of it!
Don't hold on to what's in between,
And you'll wander fully at peace."

The Buddha

Today we look a key aspect of this most strange of times: fear itself. Whether it's the virus, other people, or your own mind that sometimes gets to you. Whether you're oddly calm, having to work with mild anxiety, or find yourself in the throes of full blown panic – this is a podcast for you. 

A conversation amongst friends that neither shies away from the issue of fear nor tries to talk down its significance in our lives. And yet, there in the holding of it we catch glimpses of a much bigger perspective, one that comes out of everyday small acts of courage and kindness, and opens out into a full flowering of love. Moving accounts from our guests of personal challenges and the practice that helps overcome them. 

Join us for a good look at what scares and also at the hope that lies beyond fear's false horizon.

ps. Sorry about the audio gremlins at various points in this episode. Bandwidth contracts, Zoom struggles, computer fans kick in... Happily, it is all very listenable!

Read the full sutta extract quoted here: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/snp/snp.4.15.olen.html

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Check out our Dharma Toolkit space for details of all we have on offer to help you make it through the weirdness and stay inspired.

Come meditate with us any week day!

***

Theme music by Ackport! Used with kind permission:
https://soundcloud.com/rascal-press/06-make-room-for-fun

The Fear Issue (The Dharma Toolkit Daily, Episode 4)

The Internet doesn't always make things better! What do you do in the face of 24 hour news media that is just not going to stop? 

Join us for a conversation about how to guard the gates of our senses when it matters in order to stay sane. Inspiring words about the practice of beauty, being rooted in the body and the senses, staying centred in a storm of input and opinion and views. And a practical pathway towards life done differently, steeped in appreciative awareness of the simple, the good and the true, whatever that looks like to you.

Also discussed today:

Fear of Covid-19 is a mental contagion – and that's something we can fight by Ben Okri
Thought for the Day from Dublin
A one-take journey through Russia’s iconic Hermitage museum

Check out our Dharma Toolkit space for details of all we have on offer to help you make it through the weirdness and stay inspired.
https://thebuddhistcentre.com/toolkit/

Come meditate with us any week day!
https://thebuddhistcentre.com/stories/toolkit/meditation/

***

Theme music by Ackport! Used with kind permission:
https://soundcloud.com/rascal-press/06-make-room-for-fun

Guarding The Gates (The Dharma Toolkit Daily, Episode 5)

The Buddhist Centre Online is the home on the web for the Dharma Toolkit from the Triratna Buddhist Community. Thanks for supporting us as we work to keep you and many thousands of people around the world connected to community throughout the crisis ! 🙏🏻