Buddhist Centre Features
Buddhist Centre Features

Beauty and Environmental Action (The Dharma Toolkit Podcast, Episode 41)

By Centre Team on Sat, 17 Jul, 2021 - 17:05

Join us for a deep dive into the relationship between art, aesthetics, the environment, and the inner life of people, objects and houses! In this episode we discuss the current ecological and biodiversity crises with an artist and a poet, asking how an appreciation and fuller understanding of beauty itself can help us take action in our own lives.

Be prepared to have your notions of “the beautiful” challenged and, hopefully, also affirmed as we range with our guests Padmacandra and Vilokini...

Bump elbows, say hello!
The Community Toolkit for Uncertain Times

In the Footsteps of the Buddha at Rivendell (The Dharma Toolkit Podcast, Episode 38)

By Centre Team on Thu, 25 Mar, 2021 - 14:54

Live from Forest House near Rivendell Retreat Centre in the UK - we’re not sure a podcast setting gets any more mythic than that!

Our friends Mandarava and Nagasiddhi are running an online Home Retreat for us - with amazing puppets, original artwork for the event, and an abundance of magic images illustrating tales from the life of the Buddha. And you are invited!

Register for a space on ‘In the Footsteps of the Buddha’

Meditation,...

Bump elbows, say hello!
The Community Toolkit for Uncertain Times

Sources of Inspiration with Paramananda - Atula, Working in the Depths (The Dharma Toolkit Podcast, Episode 37)

By Centre Team on Mon, 15 Feb, 2021 - 23:44

Forty years of friendship around meditation, the Dharma, and a common interest in the workings of the ‘psyche’ - the human ‘soul’ - mark out this first pilot episode for a new series of live podcasts. Join Paramananada in conversation with a set of friends to explore and share together their ‘Sources of Inspiration’.

Our first guest is Atula (Richard Huson), psychosynthesist and good friend to many in the Triratna Buddhist Community. Atula has made it his life’s work to consider the...

Buddhist Centre Features
The Community Toolkit for Uncertain Times

Bringing Online Learning to the Slums of India (The Dharma Toolkit, Episode 36)

By Centre Team on Thu, 4 Feb, 2021 - 20:07

This episode was recorded in October 2020 when the project to bring online learning to kids from Nagpur’s poorest communities was just getting started. Please support this vital work now if you can:

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/aryaloka

***

Aryaketu is amazing. For 20 years he has been forging a life of extraordinary service in India with the Buddhist ‘Bodhisattva Path’ as the main context for his work. His vital, pioneering computer training school - the Aryaloka Institute - is all about the...

Buddhist Centre Features
Buddhist Centre Features

The Alchemical Heart (The Dharma Toolkit Podcast, Episode 35)

By Centre Team on Sun, 3 Jan, 2021 - 19:42

In this first podcast of 2021 we turn to the magic of inner transformation, with a special episode to mark our forthcoming Home Retreat on meditation: ‘The Alchemical Heart’ with Paramananda.

Happy New Year! May 2021 prove a kinder, more hopeful year for all.

In this first podcast of the year we turn to the magic of inner transformation, with a special episode to mark our forthcoming Home Retreat: ‘The Alchemical Heart’ with Paramananda.

In our conversation around the work involved...

Buddhist Centre Features
Buddhist Centre Features

Buddhist Economics, Part 2 - Post-Pandemic (The Dharma Toolkit, Episode 34)

By Centre Team on Wed, 21 Oct, 2020 - 21:56

A bonus episode with extra material from last episode’s wonderful conversation with Vaddhaka, author of ‘The Buddha On Wall Street’.

Listen to part 1 of this conversation

In part 2 of our discussion about the contribution Buddhism may have to make to all matters economic, we turn to the post-pandemic realities now faced around the world. The times prompt a reconsideration of the “attention economy” and its relationship to social inequality when everyone’s lives are much...

Buddhist Centre Features
Buddhist Centre Features

Buddhist Economics, Part 1 - Pre-Pandemic (The Dharma Toolkit, Episode 33)

By Centre Team on Wed, 7 Oct, 2020 - 20:50

We’re back with the first episode in a two-part conversation about what Buddhism has to say to 21st C. economics in the wake of populist political tides, globalization and, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic.

Listen to part 2 of this conversation

Vaddhaka is the author of The Buddha On Wall Street, a Buddhist critique of Neo-Liberal notions of capitalism. Expect a stirring, provocative discussion around the state of western democracies in relation to...

Buddhist Centre Features
The Community Toolkit for Uncertain Times

Into the Dark Wood (The Dharma Toolkit, Episode 30)

By Centre Team on Wed, 24 Jun, 2020 - 01:58

Join us for a walk into the forest of the unknown. Enchantments await. Groves of images. Bridges to the unseen. A path that wanders lost until some deeper magic happens…

We are back in the realm of art and the making of images, the making of things, the making of meaning. Nagasiddhi’s trainings in technical sculpture, prop design and building, the rituals of puppetry, and carpentry with wood left by his father long ago - all these have prepared him for a...

Community Highlights
The Community Toolkit for Uncertain Times

Meditating in the Mandala (The Dharma Toolkit, Episode 29)

By Centre Team on Sat, 6 Jun, 2020 - 21:06

To mark our latest Home Retreat, led by Tejananda, an excellent conversation and primer on meditation from a body-focussed perspective. 

Tejananda’s key image is of the dynamic mandala. Dharma practice is itself dynamic and transformative. And the transformation lies in gradually discovering how both we and the world are not at all what we originally supposed! Seeing this, we can begin to uproot the causes of suffering in our own experience.

This approach to practice is centred on the living energy of...

Community Highlights
The Community Toolkit for Uncertain Times

The River Under the River (The Dharma Toolkit, Episode 27)

By Centre Team on Tue, 26 May, 2020 - 22:27

“Deserving a place in a realm where miracles happen”

Let’s start with this image: there’s a river under the river. Then follow it via the works of William Stafford and the creative lives of members of the Wolf at the Door group: poets and writers exploring the interplay of modes of attention in their chosen art forms, mediated by the practice of Buddhism.

The wolf is there too. Alive and real and, sometimes, scary. But this...

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