- Reclaim Your Peace and Self-Worth: Basic Goodness Training Part 1
- Our Basic Goodness
Now practice it directly. Sit with your thoughts until they stop defining you, and the doorway opens to your own basic goodness — the daisy-ness of you.
- Reclaim Your Freedom and Trust: Basic Goodness Training Part 2
If you've glimpsed your own basic goodness, even a little, you've laid the foundation for something bigger. Let's widen the circle to everyone — the driver who just cut you off included.
- Metta for This Human Body
Take 'just like me' into the heart. Begin with the human body we all share, and open outward — toward others, including the ones you find difficult.
- Reclaim Your Trust in Humanity: Basic Goodness Training Part 3
Now go bigger still: society is basically good. Feel what comes up when you hear that — resistance included. We're not training to bring the fight to the other side; we're training to go beyond war.
- For the Benefit of All Beings
Every time two people meet, society is created — so what you produce inside matters. Practice with whatever comes up, aggression and rumination included, held in the aspiration that it benefits all beings.
- Stepping into Clarity by Taking the Path of Fearlessness: Basic Goodness Training Part 4
Open the heart this wide and you may feel something else — a deep, genuine sadness at what our confusion has cost. Don't turn away from it. It's a clarion call to keep training, to move through the fear toward a world worth training for.
- Basic Confidence
Go outside if you can, and take your seat in the world. Move from dissolving the self, to basic goodness, to basic confidence — beyond fear, into the senses, into the joy in every blade of grass.
Play Meditation
Basic Confidence
A powerful sequence from dissolving the self, to basic goodness, to basic confidence in the world, going beyond our fears into the senses and finding the joy and wonder in every blade of grass.
Transcript
[0:01] Let's practice.
[0:24] Sitting up with good posture, uplifted, alert, awake. Strong back, open chest, soft front. Coming to practice in this ground of basic goodness, the sense of nothing to hide and nothing to prove, no agenda. Simple, straightforward confidence in our own goodness, our own place in this world. Really seeing that struggle of external validation. Coming down to just the simple fact of our existence here.
[2:20] No more and no less than anything else, anybody else.
[3:00] In this place of confidence, We just sit and breathe. Really, that's it. That's all. Nothing else is needed.
[4:20] As we let our fabrications go, what gets revealed is just the simple clarity. Direct interaction with the world and with other beings. Revealing our basic, innate wisdom. In clarity of love and compassion and kindness. Amen.
[5:41] And so we sit and breathe. And when we notice that we've got caught up, distracted in one of our fabrications, one of our stories, we can just sort of realize, notice that it's not really needed in this moment. When we choose to put our mind to work, we can put our mind to work. Here we choose to let that go, let that be. And come back to this simple, direct clarity, confidence in ourselves, in the world, the ground that holds us. The water, the sun.
[7:23] And the air that moves as we breathe. Amen.
[10:21] The sun and the water feed us. Air brings us life. We have all we need.
[11:10] There is space for us.
[11:40] We can be ourselves.
[13:35] We are in that place of confidence, of basic goodness. As we feel it in our whole body. We can explore this world.
[14:34] We have the insects rushing around. The mist hanging over the mountain valleys. The dew at sunrise. Every little thing is full of wonder.
[16:06] The earth we can smell. It's all around us.
[16:48] To notice what's right here.