Infinite Smile

Regardless of our tradition, we can reduce our spiritual practice to its component pieces and find that Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths offers us a path toward freedom.

We first recognize our anguish, …

Michael begins this talk with the following quotation from Rilke’s Duino Elegies:

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,
because it…

In this talk, Michael speaks about how the One Precept of “Doing No Harm” can actualize the potential of awakening in any situation. Along these lines, Michael openly shares how he and his wife have …

Actively meeting inspiration through poetry can make a huge difference as we move through the world. The same applies to uncovering the things that crack us up. Laughter matters since it is a celebra…

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When we can accept reality as it is, we can no longer find ourselves to be at war with it. There is nothing to resist, in other words, when we are no longer clinging to any expectation that things sh…

We often begin our spiritual journey because we’re at the end of our rope. We seek ways to avoid our discomfort. Unfortunately, when our  practice centers itself around seeking we find that our progr…

Kanshi Sosan’s work, The Mind of Absolute Trust, offers us some great guidance in relation to meeting our lives fully. Michael leads the sangha in a reading and brief interactive analysis of the tex…

Consciously meeting the grace brought on by deep meditative work allows for us to develop a steadiness in our day-to-day lives. This doesn’t mean that we won’t experience discomfort and pain. In fact…

What happens when we realize that we can no longer live the way we have always lived? What happens when we stop our attempts at escape and instead face our lives fully, totally and completely? The an…

This talk was originally aired in December of 2005.

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What about love? In this talk Michael suggests that Big Love has nothing to do with our understanding and craving of that rush that small love …

Do we have the courage to be truly ordinary? It’s a great question that helps us uncover whatever egoic attachments we might have about who we think we are and who we think we should be. Those indiv…

We usually think of Karma in terms of “good” and “bad.” And yet these cliches don’t do much to serve up a deeper understanding of Karma’s spiritual implications. In this talk, Michael touches on seve…

The ego maintains a state of inertia that tends to cloud our experience. So often we don’t even recognize that we give ourselves over to an inherently incomplete story rooted in separation and aliena…

This podcast features one of Michael’s students, Gina Rocca, who offers an introductory talk prior to a previous sitting.

Gina’s beautiful talk is then followed up by one of Michael’s talks as well …

This podcast was originally posted  May 16th, 2006.

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What should we do about seduct…

What would it be like to be able to welcome any challenge as an invitation into awakening? Our relationship to our troubles determines the answer to this question. Are we avoiding anything? Are we at…

In this evening’s Dharma talk, Michael addresses how beauty, and our sense of it, can be impediments to awakening. “It’s not,” he says, “that there is anything wrong with beauty. In fact, beauty is e…