Wisdom Dialogues
Deepening our understanding of mind and emotions
Discover the power of wisdom with FDCW’s Wisdom Dialogues: Deepening our understanding of mind and emotions. Join us for a 6-part exploration of the mind and emotions. Learn how to cultivate wisdom and become your own therapist. This series, which builds upon last year's Compassion in Action, offers an opportunity to explore the depths of wisdom with some of the worlds most renowned thinkers on the topic. Don't miss this chance to deepen your understanding of the mind and emotions and explore techniques for calming the mind, for greater clarity, resulting in stronger compassion and more purpose in life.
“One of the most important things is to focus on bringing compassion into our everyday intentions. If we can do this, it will boost our confidence, which in turn will help us deal with challenges. If you give in to anxiety instead, you can’t use your human resources to think things through. To exercise your rational faculty, you need to relax and find peace.”
Recordings
Episode 6: Touching Our Inner Beauty
with Ven René Feusi
"The Buddha explained that mind has unlimited potential for happiness. By understanding deeply the nature of ourself and phenomena, our anxiety and unease diminishes and we discover the inner beauty of simply being. Also this inner peace makes us receptive to the same inner beauty in others and help us to live a meaningful life."
–Ven René Feusi
In this enlightening session, Ven. René shared his experiences and insights into the practice of mind investigation. Ven Rene guided us through understanding our existence and how this awareness can lead to opening our hearts and cultivating gentleness towards ourselves and others. His teachings illuminate the path to deeper self-knowledge and interconnectedness with others.
To conclude the session, Ven. René guided participants through a short meditation, offering a practical experience of the teachings.
**Per vedere il discorso di Ven René in italiano clicca qui
Episode 5: Cultivating a Relaxed and Spacious Mind
with Paula Chichester
“You can organise your life with wisdom. How? One way is by trying to make it beneficial to others rather than by living it simply for your own enjoyment. When your life is integrated and you're a wise, knowledgeable person giving a beautiful, peaceful vibration to others, it's so worthwhile.”
–Lama Thubten Yeshe, Founder of UE
What prevents us from feeling relaxed, spacious and loving? Can we make friends with feelings of shame, guilt, low self-worth rather than pushing them away or distracting ourselves from them? Where does the feeling that we are not good enough come from and why do we buy into that? Perhaps we know intellectually that those feelings are based on misunderstanding our true nature of limitless love, but how do we get there? How do we accept ourselves and embody love?
Drawing on her decades of retreat experience, teaching and study, Paula Chichester guides us in learning how to navigate our inner landscape. By looking inside and gradually training our attention, we can begin to touch limitless love for ourselves and for others.
This talk includes a 10 minute meditation led by Paula
**Per vedere il discorso di Paula in italiano clicca qui
Episode 4: Make Your Mind an Ocean
with Ven. Thubten Wangdu
“We need to develop wisdom to decide which thoughts are helpful and which are not. When an emotion arises, do not suppress it or express it, first just check it” - Ven Wangdu
Ven Wangdu offered a deep dive into our mind and how it works. We may want to be open-hearted and loving, but our mind may be very narrow making us easily upset when things don't conform to our view. If we learn to widen our outlook by examining how our emotions arise and what their nature is, we find more spaciousness. Mind and brain are closely related but are not the same thing. The essence of our mind is clear and the function of our mind is to know. Naturally thoughts, emotions, feelings constantly arise and then change.
By becoming more conscious of this process we become more familiar with the clarity of the mind and its function rather than the content of the thoughts and emotions. We can rest in an ocean of calm awareness. The mind's natural clarity is unaffected by negative thoughts and emotions.
This inspiring and insightful talk includes a 10 minute exploration of the mind led by Ven Wangdu
Episode 3: Weaving Our Own View of the World
with Kabir Saxena
We interpret the world according to our inner narrative and our conditioning. We often experience the world in all sorts of distorted and neurotic ways due to the power of the undisciplined, distracted mind.
By understanding our interconnectedness and our profound effect on one another more deeply, we can engage more positively with others and our environment. In this episode Kabir shares ways to investigate our mind, deepening our insights, and tapping into our innate goodness to allow a more peaceful, compassionate and wiser mind to flower.
Episode 2: The Nature of Mind
with Martin Ström
“Mind is clear and knowing. The clear aspect means that things arise in the mind. The mind illuminates things like perceptions, and thoughts and so things “pop up” in our mind. Then the knowing or cognizant aspect is that we become aware of these things. However, there's a lot of things going on in the mind that we are unaware of, and that's part of the reason why you want to start looking at your mind.”
–Martin Ström
In this Dialogue, Martin Ström, psychologist, trainer and author, discusses with Victoria Coleman, Executive Director of the Foundation for Developing Compassion and Wisdom how we can gradually train our mind for a more meaningful, loving and happier life….
The session concluded with a short guided meditation.
Episode 1: Becoming Your Own Therapist
with Ven. Robina Courtin |
In this episode, Ven Robina explained the importance of cultivating both wisdom as well as compassion. The first step is to gain some sort of control over the mind, at the very least making the determination each day not to harm anyone with our speech and actions. So following ethical conduct is important.
States of mind like compassion, love and forgiveness are the source of our happiness because these states accord with the reality of how our world exists. Unhelpful states like anger, anxiety, depression not only bring us pain, but are in fact based on misunderstanding reality. By working on increasing the positive states of mind, the unhelpful states of mind are naturally reduced. Typically, we interact with the world by exaggerating the objects and events we come into contact with. This disturbs our mind. But gradually we can train the mind. We can learn to loosen the grip of the neurotic mind to become clearer, more connected with others and more in touch with reality. This takes time.
