Dharma Sunday

Join Lama Willa Baker and the online sangha of Natural Dharma Fellowship for a morning of teaching, prayer, contemplation, meditation practice, and community. Not by the book, Willa’s Dharma Sundays reflect what is most immediately and spontaneously on her heartmind. Time is allotted at the end of every Sunday session for audience participation, questions and reflections. Bring your curiosity, que...

Freedom is part of our practice. We cultivate the roots of our practice to remind ourselves and each other that this is the best time to practice. Roots are the foundation that ground plants in the soil. So too, as we ground ourselves with the source of freedom that our Buddhist practice offers, we embody the underlying support that allows us to be a refuge in these turbulent times for ourselves a...

This Dharma Sunday explores part IV of Forest Teachings. Join us as we explore the intersection between meditation on the nature of mind through the lens of deep ecology in practice. Such a merging invites us to recover our forgotten intimacy with the living world. Deep ecology has long called for a shift in consciousness, while meditation enacts such a shift through recognition of who we really a...

Darkness practice is one of the most powerful methods for stripping away the conceptual veils covering our luminous buddha nature. Practiced in many spiritual traditions across the world, dark retreat is a deeply cherished tradition in a number of Tibetan Buddhist lineages surviving today. We will introduce some aspects of darkness practice, with an eye towards personal practice in the future. Ple...

This Dharma Sunday will explore Rupa-Bhavana, the cultivation of embodiment. This practice, one of the five cultivation categories taught by the Buddha, focuses on techniques to develop greater discernment, capacity, and balanced sensitivity regarding our felt experience.

Join Lama Willa Baker and the online sangha of Natural Dharma Fellowship for a morning of teaching, prayer, contemplation, meditation practice, and community. Not by the book, Willa’s Dharma Sundays reflect what is most immediately and spontaneously on her heartmind. Time is allotted at the end of every Sunday session for audience participation, questions and reflections. Bring your curiosity, que...

On this hybrid Dharma Sunday, we will continue exploring what it means to cultivate our innate capacity to relax into beingness with the energies of the phenomenal world. How we approach a renewed engagement with the more-than-human world can have a significant effect on our recognition and embodiment of innate inseparability. Through what kinds of skillful means can we invite the kind of connecti...

In his sublime meditation manual Mahamudra the Ocean of Definitive Meaning, the Ninth Karmapa briefly describes a four-step analysis for cutting through the illusion of a separate external reality presenting itself to sense perception. This session will examine the four steps and draw on insights from current cognitive philosophy and physics to offer a simple but powerful approach to challenge the...

Join Lama Willa Baker and the online sangha of Natural Dharma Fellowship for a morning of teaching, prayer, contemplation, meditation practice, and community. Not by the book, Willa’s Dharma Sundays reflect what is most immediately and spontaneously on her heartmind. Time is allotted at the end of every Sunday session for audience participation, questions and reflections. Bring your curiosity, que...

In this Dharma Sunday, we’ll learn strategies for meditating so that our practice doesn’t reactivate trauma symptoms, based on David Trelevean’s groundbreaking book Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness. This session will be helpful both for trauma survivors and for anyone experiencing dysregulation, overwhelm, disorientation, or a loss of agency. The instructor will cover the Window of Tolerance and Polyv...

This Dharma Sunday session begins with a Refuge Prayer and a guided meditation that grounds the body and expands into open awareness. Lama Liz then dives into the core question: How do we return to our true nature? She challenges the modern materialist mentality and explores how to move beyond the contracted "self" to access a vaster field of interbeing—the ancient, interconnected source that rede...

The “Four Empowerments” characterize the essence of the tantric Buddhist path. We will explore the internal structure of these four initiations and how we can relate with them as practitioners. Central to this exploration is the idea that initiation is an organic part of human experience. What seems esoteric, foreign, and unknown, is from another perspective natural and genuine. We will explore th...

The Dharma Sunday session begins with guided meditation practices followed by a teaching on eco-Dharma and the concept of becoming a disciple of Gaia. Lama Willa explores how environmental issues have become a critical focus in the present moment and proposed expanding the traditional Buddhist concept of taking refuge to include Gaia as a teacher. The session concludes with discussions on deep lis...

This Dharma Sunday teaching combines body-oriented meditation practice with a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement® lesson, the brilliant sensory-motor approach to gently and wisely re-educating the neuro-muscular system. Alternating meditation, a Feldenkrais movement lesson and discussion will allow the techniques to complement and empower each other and to enhance mind-body connections and gen...

This session features a deep dive into the meaning of Refuge—understanding our own awakened heart as the ultimate source of peace. Lama Liz then guides a powerful meditation practice, moving from grounding the body to cultivating open awareness and interconnectedness. Following the meditation, she introduces her "Forest Teachings" series, exploring the universal truth of Dharma and answering the p...

This creative and inspirational Dharma Sunday will begin with an introduction to Buddhist art that locates Buddhist images within a contemplative practice. The teachings will seek to move artists and practitioners towards basic visual literacy. This will be followed by a guided tour – both online and onsite – of an exhibition of earth-based Buddhist art created by Latin American Buddhists. We will...

In this Dharma Sunday teaching, the Third of Four teachings on "Mycelial Wisdom", Lama Willa Blythe Baker, founder of Natural Dharma Fellowship, and visiting teacher, Zoe Logan Morris, discuss The Myth of Transcendence. Using the metaphor of a mycelial network—the "wood wide web"—the teaching suggests that spiritual awakening isn't a "vertical exit" from suffering but a process of grounded engagem...

This Dharma Sunday teaching combines body-oriented meditation practice with a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement® lesson, the brilliant sensory-motor approach to gently and wisely re-educating the neuro-muscular system. Alternating meditation, a Feldenkrais movement lesson and discussion will allow the techniques to complement and empower each other and to enhance mind-body connections and gen...

In this Dharma Sunday teaching we will be exploring the ways that our personalities and styles of interaction By recognizing our own patterns of behavior and styles of manifesting in the world, we can use that awareness to go beyond judgment which keep us bound to cycles and limited perspective in our lives; and thus touch the insight of loving pervasive awareness.

In this Dharma Sunday teaching, the Second of Four teachings on "Mycelial Wisdom", Lama Willa Blythe Baker, founder of Natural Dharma Fellowship, explores the profound concept of "Anatman" (no-self). The central teaching expands on "mycelial wisdom," drawing parallels between extensive, hidden mycelial networks (described as "the neurological network of nature") and the Buddhist principle of inter...

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.

In this two-part class, participants will be invited to study and reflect on a short teaching by Buddhadasa Bhikkhu entitled “The Prison of Life” (free download). Just as prisons are rationalized as necessary containment for those whose criminal convictions make them untrustworthy or undeserving of freedom, we rationalize our self-created imprisonment as a necessary means of avoiding unforgivable...

n this two-part class, participants will be invited to study and reflect on a short teaching by Buddhadasa Bhikkhu entitled “The Prison of Life” (free download). Just as prisons are rationalized as necessary containment for those whose criminal convictions make them untrustworthy or undeserving of freedom, we rationalize our self-created imprisonment as a necessary means of avoiding unforgivable m...

We will explore how remembering who we really are expands us beyond the experiences of fragmentation, distress, overwhelm, and fear that may threaten to overwhelm us. What would it mean to realize that this “self” can hold the fullness of our human experience, from the most challenging encounters to the most beautiful? When we remember our innate connection to source at the same time as we stand s...

In this Dharma Sunday teaching, the First of Four teachings on "Mycelial Wisdom", Lama Willa Blythe Baker, founder of Natural Dharma Fellowship, explores the profound concept of interdependence (Pratitya Samudpada). Lama Willa discusses her multi-year exploration of the plant world as a source of wisdom, highlighting how mycelial networks serve as a powerful metaphor for interconnectedness. The te...