Monday Night Live! dharma talk

Every third Monday of the month come join in a meditation, hear a new dharma talk, and participate in a discussion. Each month Zac Ispa-Landa (www.zacispalanda.com) or Cara Lai (www.caralai.org) will present a fresh dharma talk and lead the audience in a meditation and group discussion.

The Burlington Dharma Collective is a practice community centered on unceded Abenaki land known as Burlington, VT. We are focused on liberatory dharma practice in community, where the strength of our practice is amplified when we come together. We are grounded in Buddhist teachings, particularly the traditions of Vajrayana as taught by Lama Rod Owens (www.LamaRod.com), and are committed to honoring the roots of these practices. We aspire to an expansive, non-dogmatic orientation that welcomes multiple ways of knowing, diverse cosmologies, and all orientations to liberation that are rooted in the intention for personal and collective freedom for all beings without exception.

Zac Ispa-Landa is a mindfulness teacher and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Vermont. At the University, he teaches courses on ecology, environmental justice, mindfulness in the Anthropocene; honeybee biology and beekeeping; and sustainability. He teaches mindfulness at Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, Inward Bound Mindfulness, MIT Sloan School, the Burlington Dharma Collective, and Bhumisparsha.

Zac began meditating and studying Dharma twenty years ago, inspired by a vision of personal and collective liberation, and has spent thousands of hours in meditation and hundreds of days on retreat since. He began mindfulness practice with vipassana (Insight) meditation and, in recent years, has been practicing Vajrayana (tantric) Buddhism with Lama Rod Owens, who he's worked and taught with since 2017. Zac lives Winooski, Vermont with his partner, son, and tens of thousands of honeybees.

Cara Lai is a meditation teacher, artist, and writer who helps people step out of the cycle of suffering and into the fullness of life.

She spent most of her life trying to figure out how to be happy, or at least avoid total misery, which ultimately led her to spend the majority of her adulthood meditating. She's explored what it means to be alive through many adventures in consciousness, including a full year of solitary retreat, living with chronic illness, and having two whole humans come out through her vagina.

She once worked a wilderness guide, social worker, and psychotherapist, but traded it in for an all-out mindfulness rampage. She's a working mom whose teaching is relatable, authentic, funny and sometimes crass, and is accessible for many people. She is authorized to teach in the Theravada Buddhist Lineage through IMS/Spirit Rock, and she teaches at centers across the country, for the Happier app, Ten Percent Happier, Hatch, and more. She lives with her husband, toddler, and new infant in Hinesburg, Vermont, ultimately hoping to get woke enough to bend spoons with her mind in front of large audiences. And to help everyone get free.

Category: Community | Religion and Spirituality