Natural Meditation podcast

Stephan Pende invites you to a journey through your experience. The emphasis is on discovering a loving curiosity with everything that arises. Whatever arises, love that!

There are many different objects possible in meditation. Stephan Pende explores different options and helps you to choose the meditation practice which is suitable for you.

Not only are the things outside ourselves empty of the solid, objective reality we project onto them, the same is true for our inner sense of self. We instinctively feel that we exist as something very real, definite, and substantial. We have no doubt about this real me and it seems absurd to think of it as just another hallucination. - Lama Yeshe

Explore effortlessness in meditation. Non-striving, non-controlling, non-interfering, and non-fixing. Explore how to relax your judgement about the content of awareness and rest as awareness.

Meditation is a time when you are not pressuring yourself to perform. You are resting very deeply and relaxing, yet you are paying attention in an easy manner. - Lorin Roche

Stephan Pende gives an introduction to the different meditation techniques in the Buddhist Tradition. He encourages to find your own meditation style by listening to your preferences and rhythms.

Whenever we practice meditation, it is important to try to refrain from criticizing ourselves about how we practice and what comes up in our practice. This would only be training in being hard on ourselves! I want to emphasize the importance of maintaining an atmosphere of unconditional friendliness when you practice and as you take your practice out into the world.

Guided meditation to work with challenging past and future situations. Tonglen is a practice which supports you in healing, forgiving, and letting go of painful situations where your patterns are triggered.

The Jesus story is a mirror that helps us to see ourselves more clearly. The primary function of mythic storytelling is to render life transparent to the underlying transcendence that shines through it. This is the power of storytelling. Storytelling invites us into a creative relationship with the story. - Adyashanti

Jesus symbolizes the spiritual mystery of each one of us and points us toward the radiance within that is available right now.

Dwelling deep within our heart, and within the hearts of all beings without exception, is an inexhaustible source of love and wisdom. And the ultimate purpose of all spiritual practices, whether they are called Buddhist or not, is to uncover and make contact with this essentially pure nature. - Lama Yeshe

The Buddha saw that we suffer because we distort reality. The cause of our stress and struggles are our projections, we are co-creators of the world we live in. What are these distortions and how can we dissolve them?

Before you listen to this track please listen to "Preparing the Ground for Bodhicitta 3".

As the further step in discovering Bodhicitta we find the capacity to care within us. We connect with the soft spot in our heart by connecting with the care and kindness we have received throughout our life.

Wherever you are on your journey, there is another wonderful truth called “Living the Fruit” or “Starting with the Result.” The fruits of well-being and the experience of joy, freedom, and love are available now, whatever your circumstance! - Jack Kornfield

Reframing how you see a difficult person can change you feel about him or her. This is the traditional guided meditation on the "enemy".

In the Tibetan tradition, we prepare the ground for Bodhicitta with equanimity. In this talk, you are introduced to the main methods to discover an openess and kinship with all living beings.

Sometimes it is difficult for us to connect with a genuinely felt sense of warmth and kindness towards ourselves. In this meditation, you learn a method to strengthen this natural quality within you.

How do we prepare ourselves so that we genuinely can open to others? It is important to first heal your own wounds and insecurities. Genuine Bodhicitta can only grow if you come from a stable self-acceptance. Stephan Pende shares traditional approaches to self-healing.

Stephan Pende gives examples on how to practice tonglen in your daily life. Every difficult experience and every wonderful experience gives us the opportunity to open, to soften, to share and to grow. Tonglen is one method to do so.

As spaciousness opens within you, you can experience a profound silence in your very being. You may feel nervous at first, and at the same time, you’ve longed for this. This is the vast silence that surrounds life. Trust it and rest in the stillness. Feel your heart open and become more fully alive. Everything that arises from this silence is only a cloud in the vast sky, a wave on the ocean. Rest...

The deep, peaceful clarity of our essential mind is in the nature of love, and in this calm atmosphere the disturbances of hatred and anger have no place. While absorbed in this deep state of awareness, there is no chance for a harmful thought to agitate us. It is not a question of consciously deciding to refrain from anger and behave virtuously; this loving, benevolent feeling arises spontaneousl...

The tonglen practice is a method for connecting with suffering — ours and that which is all around us — everywhere we go. It is a method for overcoming the fear of suffering and for dissolving the tightness of our heart. Primarily it is a method for awakening the compassion that is inherent in all of us.

We begin the practice by taking on the suffering of a person we know to be hurting and whom we wish to help. For instance, if you know of a child who is being hurt, you breathe in the wish to take away all the pain and fear of that child. Then, as you breathe out, you send the child happiness, joy, or whatever would relieve their pain. This is the core of the practice: breathing in other’s pain so...

Tonglen can be translated as "taking in and sending out." It is a Buddhist practice that can assist us in countering the human tendency to resist emotional discomfort. Instead of engaging in the habitual response of pushing away pain, the practice of tonglen invites us to bring the discomfort close. It is totally counter-intuitive, yet it is a profound way to cultivate inner peace and compassion.