Martin Aylward in Conversation with Jacob Burda

Martin Aylward began dharma practice and study aged 19, spending several years in Asian monasteries and with Himalayan hermits. Teaching worldwide since 1999, Martin co-founded Moulin de Chaves, the retreat center where he lives and teaches in SW France; the Mindfulness Training Institute and the online dharma community Sangha Live. A husband and father, he integrates dharma into daily life with programs like Work Sex Money Dharma. His latest book is Awake Where You Are (2021).
Jacob Burda is co-founder of the Alpine Fellowship. He earned his PhD degree at the University of Oxford, writing his doctoral thesis on the conception of infinity in early German Romanticism. His thesis was translated into German and published with Metzler. He has lectured on German literature and philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is particularly interested in cultural history, phenomenology (especially Heidegger), and the philosophy of physics.
This video was filmed live at the Alpine Fellowship 2023 Symposium in Fjallnas, Sweden. The event was held in partnership with Bard College through the Open Society University Network and supported in part by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.

[@mandys1505]

interesting that he went and even visited with hermits; i have always been fascinated by them...

[@mandys1505]

... i appreciate what he said on the meditation on dying; i have practiced zazen and felt the ego dissolution which is very comforting, what they call the " dharma-kaya" , or the dwelling in- between the selves. Also i have gotten insight into what medieval christianity was going after, with the bodily ordeals amd valuing sickness, because when i have been ill and in pain, i have experienced a shift in my ego, where i no longer identified with it ( or "me" my name, my body, my self... ) in the same way. And maybe this gives us insight the ego has many potentials... and this can teach us, possibly, the wisdom of values, and that health and social ego are not the highest, but that what we could call the connection to and participation in the holy, is the highest value; whether we are sick or healthy~ and then that would give us a kind of security and trust which would be unshakable, through all of these vacillations..