A beautiful talk by Urgyen Sangharakshita (without notes), at the Wesak celebration 2007 of FWBO Stockholm, held at the Etnografiska Museum. During this visit to Sweden Sangharakshita also visited and named our then newly acquired Retreat Centre. He gave it the name Dharmagiri, 'the hill where the Dharma is practised.'

A moving and personal talk, by Vidyamala, given at the 25-year jubilee retreat (of FWBO activities in Stockholm) in a beautiful setting in the archipelago north of Stockholm, Sweden, September 2005.

A talk on kindness, the quality of caring and the Bodhisattva Ideal, at the Stockholm Buddhistcenter, on 5 September 2005.

Kavyasiddhi gave this talk on the Christmas Oasis Retreat at Taraloka. She says: "It's an accessible talk, given on a retreat open to people of all levels of meditation experience, which shares a personal account of mistaking the Metta Bhavana for a 'manufacture and distribution' process and coming to see it as a key to stop 'fighting' my experience; and how I see the practice as an act of faith in the connected, potential filled Reality, described by the Buddha.

And I look at what metta is and the implications for doing the practice - on one's own mind and, in potential, for the world."

Given at Taraloka, December 2009

Please note, the original sound recording of this talk was of low quality and this comes through on the online version.

The Dhatuvibhanga Sutta - the Exposition of the Elements - tells the story of a meeting between the Buddha and a young monk called Pukkusati. The young monk doesn't at first realise who he is sharing his lodgings with. He is just very grateful the next morning for the offer of some help with his meditation practice. And the Buddha teaches him the Six Element Practice - that was after sitting all night meditating together!

Kulaprabha has often referred to this sutta while introducing people to the Six Element practice on ordination retreats. And the month before giving the talk she had been at Akashavana Retreat Centre in Spain co-leading a retreat for members of the Western Buddhist Order on that theme. This version of the talk was given in a very different context - at Windhorse Trading's main wholesale warehouse in Cambridge, UK. She had been asked to talk about Insight and Work. As you'll hear in the talk, Kulaprabha was a bit stumped as to how to do that but in the end thought that it was worth taking the ideas and reflections from her experience of the Six Element practice and suggesting to the Windhorse workers that they might find their own ways to apply them in the very busy context of running a business.

Given at Windhorse Trading, Cambridge, 2007