From meditation retreats to pop music, Vipassana teacher Trudy Goodman describes cultivating devotion in both obvious and unlikely places.

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In this episode, Trudy Goodman illuminates:

• Cultivating devotion through seeing things with a positive connotation
• The activity of compassion as a beautiful possibility to experience the sacred
• A story of Trudy’s daughter and facing severe illness with grace
• Holding a deep gratitude for life and the dharma
• Practicing devotion through pop music and romance ballads
• Remembering the present moment, the only moment we have
• Experiencing devotion through the tenderness of our shared joys and sorrows
• Enduring messy and painful moments with gratitude and continuing to enjoy our practice
• How judgment and worry fall away when we are truly present
• A lesson from Ram Dass on loving everything
• Emerging from the mystery of the cosmos

This recording from a 2025 retreat at Spirit Rock was originally published on Dharmaseed

About Trudy Goodman:

Trudy is a Vipassana teacher in the Theravada lineage and the Founding Teacher of InsightLA. For 25 years, in Cambridge, MA, Trudy practiced mindfulness-based psychotherapy with children, teenagers, couples and individuals. Trudy conducts retreats, engages in activism work, and teaches workshops worldwide and online. She is also the voice of Trudy the Love Barbarian in the Netflix series, The Midnight Gospel. You can learn more about Trudy’s flourishing array of wonderful offerings at TrudyGoodman.com

“Of course, these songs are romantic songs, devoted to you, my lover. But, you could say devoted to you, the Buddha, the dharma, the sangha. You could listen to all those teenage ballads that way, and it deepens your practice. You can listen to beautiful religiously inspired music like Bach, but you can also listen to pop songs. It can be about the Dharma. Devotion everywhere." –Trudy Goodman

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Gil Fronsdal explores practicing in accord with nature, showing how mindfulness and honesty help us release resistance and move with the natural flow of the Dharma.

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This time on the BHNN Guest Podcast, Gil Fronsdal lectures on:

• Being in accord with the dharma, with truth, and with nature
• The painful attitudes that we often bring to change
• Accepting our feelings rather than pushing them away
• How resistance to reality causes more suffering
• Mindfulness: creating the ideal conditions for the natural process of healing
• Floating down the stream of Dharma rather than struggling up a mountain
• Studying nature rather than rushing into conclusions
• Becoming an observer of our own lives with child-like openness and adult-like resolve

About Gil Fronsdal:

Gil Fronsdal is the co-teacher for the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California; he has been teaching since 1990. He has practiced Zen and Vipassana in the U.S. and Asia since 1975. He was a Theravada monk in Burma in 1985, and in 1989 began training with Jack Kornfield to be a Vipassana teacher. Gil teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center where he is part of its Teachers Council. Gil was ordained as a Soto Zen priest at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1982, and in 1995 received Dharma Transmission from Mel Weitsman, the abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center. He currently serves on the SF Zen Center Elders’ Council. In 2011 he founded IMC’s Insight Retreat Center. He is the author of The Issue at Hand, essays on mindfulness practice; A Monastery Within; a book on the five hindrances called Unhindered; and the translator of The Dhammapada, published by Shambhala Publications. You may listen to Gil’s talks on Audio Dharma.

This recording was originally published on Dharmaseed

"We're in this stream of the dharma, this stream of practice. It is not fighting up a mountain and struggling so much. It is finding a place to rest in the stream and we find ourselves being carried along beautifully into the ocean. The ocean is so big it can hold all of us. Isn't that nice? It's not like you're going to be king of the mountain. We're all going to be brothers and sisters in this great ocean of the dharma." –Gil Fronsdal

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We are starting a special mini-series featuring Ram Dass and guests from his Satsang on Maui.

This episode kicks things off with Kirtan by Uma Reed, as Ram Dass humorously explores the wonder of aging and seeing the entire world as God.

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“Aging is wonderful, all you have to do is stay conscious.” –Ram Dass

In this Satsang with Ram Dass, the group talks about:

• Dealing with pain, injury, illness, and other effects of aging
• Seeing the body as simply a vehicle for this plane of reality
• Ram Dass’s book Still Here and aging with awareness
• Focusing on our consciousness rather than concerning ourselves with the body’s decline
• Ram Dass’s story of seeing Krishna in a police officer
• Playing our roles while we are in this worldly plane
• Karma Yoga and seeing the entire world as God

This talk was recorded in 2008 at one of Ram Dass' quarterly Sunday Satsang gatherings in Studio Maui.

“I’m learning the aging process has to do with the body and my consciousness need not be concerned with my body. The body is a car, it’s a transport for this plane.” –Ram Dass

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