Register for Online Dharma Sunday (10/25) - Forest Teachings, Part VII: Everything Is Dancing - Relaxing the Illusion of Separateness (Online)

10:00 am – 12:00 pm ET

This is the online registration for the hybrid Dharma Sunday. If you plan to attend in person at Wonderwell, click here to register.

On this hybrid Dharma Sunday, join Lama Liz for the seventh installation of the Forest Teachings, a series of Dharma talks inspired through exploring how the energies of the living world invite us into deep renewal, transformation, and reconnection with the more that we are and always have been. On this Sunday, we will explore how relaxation and non-separation can be understood as two sides of the same movement. We will ask ourselves: What would it mean to move through the world without continually tightening around the idea of being a separate self?

What might become visible, or audible, or intimate, when we relax our resistance to belonging to the whole field of experience? We often imagine relaxation as something that happens to us: we relax the body, quiet the mind, release tension. But from a Dzogchen perspective, relaxation means relaxing the activity of separation itself. Relaxation has something to teach us about the very structure of how we experience ourselves as separate beings.

When we look closely, there is a great deal of effort involved in maintaining the sense that I am here and the world is out there. I am the one who is experiencing, and everything else is what I am experiencing. I am the one who sees, and there is something outside me that is seen. I am the one who hears, and there is something outside me that is heard. When we are contracted around separation, appearances can seem heavy and solid and somehow outside us. But when that contraction relaxes, something about their nature can begin to shimmer. There is a kind of radiance that becomes available when we are not continually stepping back from experience and turning it into something we have to understand, control, or defend ourselves against.

Together we will ask what would happen if the shimmer of luminosity we recognize in awareness could begin to move through us freely—like a river of rushing sensation, flowing through the body, flowing through perception, flowing through love, and pouring itself out into the world?

These are not questions we have to answer – they are questions to live.

Natural Dharma Fellowship’s Dharma Sundays are donation-based gatherings open to all, offering a wide range of topics. Led by highly trained NDF Dharma and guest teachers, these live, interactive sessions include guided meditation, teachings, and time for questions and discussion. Please join us to settle into the support of sangha and the joy of practicing together.

Zoom link —The Zoom meeting link will be emailed separately two days before the session or following registration if closer to the event time. Please put this address in your Contacts to ensure you receive our emails: register@naturaldharma.org. If you haven’t received the link, please first check your spam folder and then contact the email above by the prior Saturday or zoomsupport@natualdharma.org the morning of the session if you still need assistance.

Important: Please put these this email address in your Contact or Safe-Send list to make sure you receive our emails:

• register@naturaldharma.org

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