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. 

Awakening is not something we achieve; it is something we recognize. Yet subtle patterns of mind and identity obscure what is already present. In this experiential workshop, we explore what stands in the way of direct recognition and how it can naturally fall away. Many traditions describe awakening as a kind of remembering, recognizing what has always been here. If this is true, what prevents us from seeing it? In this workshop, we turn our attention to the subtle ways the sense of separation is maintained: patterns of thought, emotional conditioning, and unconscious identification. Rather than trying to fix or transcend them, we explore how seeing them clearly allows them to soften and release. Through guided inquiry and shared exploration, we begin to uncover the ever-present awareness that is not separate from our experience, but is the ground of it. This is a deeply experiential session using Collective Interactive Meditation, a method that brings insight alive through direct, shared exploration.

In just four lines, the Seven Branch Prayer contains the condensed essence of the Buddhist path. Please see the Seven Branch Prayer file attached to the confirmation email you will receive after you submit your registration. 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.

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.

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.

Prison Dharma: Buddhist perspectives and practices for developing inner peace independent from outer context. In the Buddha’s first teaching, he named the forms of suffering that define the human condition, two of which are the pain of being separated from what we love and the stress of being forced to associate with what we loathe. This talk draws from years of experience working within the correctional system, with people from widely varying backgrounds all needing to cope with their powerlessness over their surroundings. We will explore several meditative and reflective techniques that are effective in meeting the presence of dukkha and our own unskillfulness with a steady heart, moving toward a practice of radical acceptance without reactivity.

On this Dharma Sunday, we explore how our inner expression of innate creativity is mirrored everywhere in the natural world. Asking if creative expression is the fundamental movement of life itself, we can develop our path of awakening, of remembering who we really are, as a growing sensitivity to how we inhabit each and every moment. Can we discover how to step aside from constructing a fabricated life out of a desire to control and instead relax into a profound participation with the creative flow of existence? This Forest Teaching will delve into these questions and more, seeking to open new ways of being and connecting to our deepest wholeness.

What if imagination isn’t mere fantasy, but a doorway into profound spiritual reality? Join us for an exploration of how three great wisdom traditions—Jungian depth psychology, Sufi mysticism, and Vajrayana Buddhism—understand the transformative power of visionary experience. We’ll journey through Carl Jung’s discovery of archetypes of the collective unconscious during his personal crisis, Ibn al-Arabi’s teachings on the alam al-mithal (the imaginal realm between spirit and matter), and the Vajrayana understanding of sambhogakaya—the dimension of luminous appearance where deities arise. Through stories of these masters’ own visionary breakthroughs and guided contemplative exercises, we’ll discover how imagination serves as a genuine organ of spiritual perception. Whether you’re new to meditation or an experienced practitioner, this talk offers practical insights for deepening your own contemplative life. Discover how archetypes, imaginal forms, and deity visualization point toward the same profound truth: mind and reality are not separate, and imagination is the bridge that reveals their unity.

What does it mean to learn from a teacher, and how does that relationship support awakening? In this hour-long dharma talk, we’ll explore the role of the teacher–student relationship in spiritual practice—its possibilities, challenges and ethical foundations.  Drawing on traditional teachings and contemporary perspectives, the talk will reflect on the role of discernment, trust, inner wisdom, responsibility and agency in cultivating a relationship with a teacher or teachers.  We will also consider the breadth of what “teacher” means in an Eastern context, as a principal that permeates our outer, inner and innermost world, how being a student is a practice of taking life itself as our teacher.

This special meditation session will focus on weaving together a profound blend of practices inspired by Longchenpa’s three excellences, along with other potent methods for awakening the special kind of courage, compassion, and spiritual strength needed in these challenging times. These perilous times challenge us all to source new depths of spiritual strength, wisdom, compassion, inspiration, and courage. This special meditation session will focus on weaving together a profound blend of practices inspired by Longchenpa’s three excellences, along with other potent methods for awakening the special kind of courage, compassion, and spiritual strength needed in these challenging times. Insight will also be drawn from the Leveys’ new book – Manual for the Awakening Warrior – which explores how these practices meet the real world of activism, social justice, and courageous earth stewarding for the benefit of all.  (See: http://WisdomAtWork.com/LeveysAwakeningWarrior/)

The terms “Awakening” and “Realization” are used in many different ways and are often interchangeable. Join us to explore all the angles, all the while striving to maintain plausible deniability. Beyond the embarrassment that “Enlightenment” is something we in fact can have no idea about, the terms “Awakening” and “Realization” are used in many different ways in many different paths. We will examine these notions from different angles, with examples from traditional frameworks found in the Mahayana Sutras, the Five Paths, the Four Yogas of Mahamudra, and the Three Words of Garab Dorje.

This class 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 general well-being. Many new and long-time meditators discover that Feldenkrais practices can help them feel greater physical ease and less pain, both in meditation and in everyday activities, by freeing up habitual patterns embedded in the neuromuscular system. For this program, you will need a place to lie down and a chair to sit on. A resource handout will also be available for participants.

What does it mean to become truly present and why does it matter? In this midday Sunday session, we will explore radical presence, a state of being that understands that there is only–and only ever will be–the here and now. To enter radical presence means to grapple with how we self-exile: all the ways we absence our body, parts of our world, and even our life itself.  We will consider how returning to the body, the moment and all the conditions of our life begins to restore a reliable refuge that has always been here, an eternal version of time. 

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.

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.

“This suffering is a matter not just of empathy but also of material interdependence.” Space, Alive: The amniotic fluid in which we learn to float. Our shared medium with all beings. Each aggregation always different, unique. Aggregations of aggregations, of aggregations affecting one another across “universes” “internal” and “external”…boundless. Pulsing.

On this Dharma Sunday, and as we prepare to step into the New Year, we will explore the power of light to remind us of who we really are, and to return us to an immersion in loving awareness as a source for renewed activity and care in the world. Join Lama Liz for this fifth installation of the Forest Teachings, a series of offerings exploring different avenues through which we can transform our lives into compassionate, fierce, and wise expressions of our interconnectedness with the living world and the cosmos from which we come.

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.

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, questions and insights.

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 and for each other.

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 are, revealing that the luminous self and world are one. To awaken our innate nature is to remember who we truly are — the earth aware of itself, the cosmos knowing itself through the human form.

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. Please bring a sleep mask, blindfold, or prepare a space of relative darkness.

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, questions and insights.

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 connection that transforms, awakens, and reminds us of who we really are? Join Lama Liz as we investigate transformative approaches to practicing into wholeness.

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 basic mistake that incites mental afflictions.

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, questions and insights.

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 Polyvagal Theory, with some review of Somatic Experiencing and nervous system resets. The workshop includes practicing techniques together to support stability and healing.

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 redefines our relationship with the living world.

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 these tensions and also discuss initiation as a perennial human rite of passage. 

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 listening to nature, the importance of slowing down in a fast-paced world, and the need for dialogue between activists and spiritual practitioners to address ecological and spiritual crises.

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 general well-being.

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 profound question: How do we return to our true nature? Discover the ease and wholeness that emerge when we release the tension of the separate self.

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 conclude with a meditation inspired by a prize-winning painting of Tara by a young Mexican artist as our focus, as an example of how art can open pathways in our spiritual practice. 

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 engagement with the world. True enlightenment, or Bodhi, is about recognizing our profound interconnectedness with all life. The path is not about changing who you are or escaping the present moment, but about coming home to your innate nature and embracing your place in the web of life.

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 general well-being. Many new and long-time meditators discover that Feldenkrais practices can help them feel greater physical ease and less pain, both in meditation and in everyday activities, by freeing up habitual patterns embedded in the neuromuscular system. This can also help incorporate the body’s natural intelligence into the process of spiritual inquiry and more fully embodied presence.

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 interdependent connection. Lama Willa explains that the Buddha's teaching of "Anatman" (no-self) challenges the deeply held belief in a solid, independent self. Instead, it posits that the self is a conceptual construction and a fluid "node in a communicative web," much like a mushroom is merely the "fruiting body" of a larger, interconnected mycelial matrix.

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 mistakes on our spiritual journey. Buddhadasa asks us to look at the prisons we make for ourselves out of desire for purity and goodness, our instincts, and even our teachers. This is a subtle and challenging inquiry, but necessary when your discipline brings you to a frustrated and joyless state. Kyira, also known as Acharya Abhaya, will offer contemplative and meditative tools to support engaging with the text, developed with the insight of all that she has learned about prison journeys in her years as a correctional chaplain.

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 mistakes on our spiritual journey. Buddhadasa asks us to look at the prisons we make for ourselves out of desire for purity and goodness, our instincts, and even our teachers. This is a subtle and challenging inquiry, but necessary when your discipline brings you to a frustrated and joyless state. Kyira, also known as Acharya Abhaya, will offer contemplative and meditative tools to support engaging with the text, developed with the insight of all that she has learned about prison journeys in her years as a correctional chaplain.

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 strong in our individual manifestation of care in the world, we discover a source of resilience capable of carrying us deeper and deeper along the path.

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 teaching emphasizes that the idea of a separate, individual self is an illusion, and that true understanding arises from recognizing our non-separation from the world.

Instead of chasing the future, or dwelling in the past; on the Buddhist path, we are given the opportunity, through meditation, to work with what’s here right now. There is no path apart from our very own footsteps, no rhythm to strive for apart from our natural breath and heartbeat. While things might not always be going our way, the path of meditation offers us respite amidst the eye of the storm, in the sacred open space of the present moment as it is.    

Drawing inspiration from the great yogi Shabkar and the “holy book of nature” this session will expand our heart-mind into the vastness of interbeing through the dynamic interfusion of Refuge, Bodhichitta, & Tonglen. The profound practices of Refuge, Bodhichitta, and Tonglen open our hearts and expand our view to glimpse and access boundless resourcefulness, fearlessness, and selfless wisdom and responsive compassion. Exploring the synergy and skillful interfusion of Refuge, Bodhichitta, and Tonglen, we’ll reflect upon profound teachings from Shabkar, a wise yogi who lived in the 18th and 19th centuries, who drew deep inspiration from the holy book of nature.

There is no doubt that we are  living in turbulent times and that we’ll continue to see rapid change and heightened uncertainty in the world. We may be experiencing moments of anxiety, dread, or fear – all part of our humanness — but the question is how to respond to these unsettling influences that threaten our equanimity. The emphasis of our time today will be on finding inspiration for our practice and cultivating the resilience that leads to a fearless heart. We live in challenging times, yet we’re given the opportunity to use these challenges to inspire us along the path to awakening.

Dharma Sundays with Natural Dharma Fellowship take place most Sundays. These sessions, led by highly trained NDF Dharma and guest teachers, include guided meditation, teachings, and time for discussions. A wide range of topics are offered at the discretion of the teacher.