Martin explores the indivisible nature of life, the mystery of an existence that is constantly slipping away from us, and love as the true heart's response to the inevitability of death. This talk stands alone, yet also builds on the themes of the previous two teachings from the same retreat.
Avoiding fixed positions and judgements about desire, Martin encourages an open inquiry into wanting. He examines the root of all desire; wanting things to be different, and explores how we can use wanting as a mirror to learn from our reflected experience. The talk points towards the deep desire to give up our endless interventions and manipulation of our experience, and discusses the freedom of undemanding, undefended, undistracted awareness.
In this talk, Martin explores the ideas and images we hold of Body, the habitual ways we react to bodily experience and body image, and the tendency to relate to body as a thing rather than a process. He guides the listener through the direct experience of body as a fluid, edgeless, inconceivable unfolding, inviting us to more and more inhabit the visceral ground of all experience; the body of life.
We long for inner space and peace, yet we also defend against it, compulsively filling the open space of consciousness with the endless mental proliferation that gives us our sense of self and world. In this talk Martin explores the 3 major expressions of this inner momentum, showing us ways to recognise, understand, and let go of our demands, defences and distractions, and allowing instead the genuine, wide open spaciousness of our nature.
This talk looks at the way we respond to life when consciousness is not caught in obsessions or reactivity. Martin explores 4 specifically different dimensions of love (Brahma Viharas) and invokes their commonality in dissolving our sense of separateness; beckoning us into an exquisite intimacy with life.
This talk looks at the inevitability in language of either reifying or negating existence; "It (self) exists" or "it doesn't exist", and how either view is problematic, inviting us in the living immediacy of life, to discover the middle way beyond existing or not-existing.
Martin explores how our various views condition our experience, and keep us locked into viewing and reacting to life in all too familiar ways. We look at the way our views limit our experience of who we are, and how investigating those views can lead us into a more ambiguous, and more liberated sense of our participation in life.
Martin explores the mechanism of wanting, the felt sense of different types of desire, and 3 ways of contemplating wanting in order to understand it more fully, and to free our relationship with desire.
