Infinite Smile

ISmile309 – Staring Through the Eyes of God

Consciously meeting the grace brought on by deep meditative work allows for us to develop a steadiness in our day-to-day lives. This doesn't mean that we won't experience discomfort and pain. In fact, when we let both our physical and emotional discomfort inform our lives, instead of defining them, we can begin to fearlessly welcome the change. Each bit of discomfort, in other words, is an invitation for each of us to shift toward greater depth. With enough practice, this shift allows for us...

ISmile308 – When We Can’t Go Back

What happens when we realize that we can no longer live the way we have always lived? What happens when we stop our attempts at escape and instead face our lives fully, totally and completely? The answers to these questions are the foundations to a path that takes us deeper and deeper into the harder to reach places of the mind. This path of self-study has the potential of putting us into the heart of a divine flame that is at once glorious and painful. We begin to feel more of life as our ma...

ISmile307 – Moving From Fear To Love

In this talk, Michael explores the inherent limitations that fear puts on each of us. At the beginning of the talk he asks how we might live if we knew we couldn't fail. How might this alter our approach to life? Without the constant threat of failure, he argues, we would be able to approach life without fear. Living fearlessly, he continues, means that we are orienting our lives from love. Living in this way allows for us to embody the sacred teachings of many traditions.

ISmile306 – The Way Off Samsara’s Wheel

The Buddhist tradition offers a system to be used as a path toward liberation from suffering. Of course it takes work and isn't necessarily easy. But in this talk, Michael McAlister discusses how we can use the Eightfold Path, and even some derivations, to get us more deeply into the work. He uses a traditional Tibetan thanka, featured on the left, as a descriptor and also offers up pointers as any committed practitioner begins to work with each of the components of the path. He goes on to su...

Encore: ISmile93 – Love

This talk was originally aired in December of 2005. ___ What about love? In this talk Michael suggests that Big Love has nothing to do with our understanding and craving of that rush that small love brings. In fact, he uses the words of Rumi to point out how what is really necessary for Big Love to inform all of our circumstances. The unfolding of Big Love and the ultimate surrender to it allows us to live from the roots of Being. Furthermore, the Four Horsemen of Relationship, as articulat...

ISmile305 – Extraordinary Ordinariness

Do we have the courage to be truly ordinary? It's a great question that helps us uncover whatever egoic attachments we might have about who we think we are and who we think we should be. Those individuals that can let go of these deep stories have an opportunity to share something deep and worthy: truth. This truth arises whenever we allow for our clinging to release, and this released style of living can't be anything other than helpful to all those we might meet. Topics in this evening's t...

ISmile304 – Untangling Karmic Knots

We usually think of Karma in terms of "good" and "bad." And yet these cliches don't do much to serve up a deeper understanding of Karma's spiritual implications. In this talk, Michael touches on several topics that center around the human tendency to act and behave from a profound sense of separation. Action from this orientation, in Buddhist terms, generates Karma. With this in mind, Karma that we might consider good, would be activity that is spontaneously and deeply rooted in generosity. O...

ISmile303 – From the Personal to the Impersonal

The ego maintains a state of inertia that tends to cloud our experience. So often we don't even recognize that we give ourselves over to an inherently incomplete story rooted in separation and alienation. Michael points out that we are made up of Emptiness and what arises out of it and what dies back into it. Once we see that we are infinite at our core, we can begin to see that this self we've always believed in is a partial reflection of what's real; that we're more that what we think we a...

ISmile302 – Living Without Distortion

This podcast features one of Michael's students, Gina Rocca, who offers an introductory talk prior to a previous sitting. Gina's beautiful talk is then followed up by one of Michael's talks as well as Q & A. ___ Michael addresses the enlightened message of several traditions and suggests that they begin to intertwine at some key places. Among these points is the notion of being good to each other and recognizing the power of surrendering to what is actually happening. Issues like attachm...

Encore Post: ISmile117 – Seduction

This podcast was originally posted  May 16th, 2006. ___ Subscribe to this podcast from the Buddhist and/or Philosophy sections of the Religion & Spirituality list. ____ What should we do about seduction as we walk the spiritual Path? Not just physical seduction, but intellectual, emotional, and even spiritual seduction. In tonight's talk, Michael suggests that seduction is the natural magnetism that shows us our attachments. Questions and comments deal with what to do after ego is exposed ...

ISmile301 – Surfing Pain’s Waves

People tend to arrive at spiritual work because of some type of dissatisfaction with their lives. It's the human tendency to try to distance ourselves from this discomfort and yet running from our pain never seems to alleviate it for very long. Buddhist teaching suggests a different route that leads us not away from our pain and suffering but rather directs us through it. Meeting our dissatisfaction fully offers us an alternative view of whatever ailes us. This different view has the potenti...

ISmile300 – Our Invitation Home

Recognizing that all things are truly impermanent can be terrifying. So much of our time in life is devoted to keeping this fundamental reality from creeping into our awareness that we often miss the behaviors that lead us away from the very awakening we claim to want. Once we actually shut up, sit still and actually stop, we find that all sorts of opportunities open up to us. Among the most important realizations is that in our deepest awareness we see that there is no place to hide. Seeing ...

ISmile299 – Integrating Big Self with Small Self

Our work, as practitioners, ultimately centers itself around our ability to shift our perspective from what is contracted to that which is utterly expansive. Once we see this new, more comprehensive view, our work evolves toward integrating this new vision with our old perspective. This dance back and forth becomes a way of living that incorporates a commitment to benefitting all beings. Sitting still regularly supports this realization. As it's incorporated, it naturally, and spontaneously,...

ISmile298 – The Steps to Freedom

Once we come to terms with the fact that nothing lasts, even the idea of clinging begins to lose its gravitational pull. Cultivating this opening has been taught in several traditions, with Eihei Dogen's, "Eight Awakenings of Great Beings," offering Zen students an excellent guide for achieving this goal. Looking closely at the Eight Awakenings, we see how this process shows us how our desires don't need to overtake us. We also start to see that we can recognize how much is enough in any sit...

ISmile297 – The Shadow and the Light

Rumi says, "When the water gets caught in habitual whirlpools, dig a way out through the bottom to the ocean." How many habitual behaviors and thought patterns diminish our experience? Looking carefully at the answer to this question helps us uncover what blocks our awakening. Really digging our way out, however, begins to show rewards as our meditation practice becomes a deeper reflection of our commitment to living an undivided life. And this undivided life involves, as much as anything, ma...

ISmile296 – Awakening to Deeper Love

For the ego, misery is a far better choice than the Mystery, especially when it comes to relationships. Centering our entire being in the heart of our experience as a Witnessing awareness helps change this orientation and has the potential to end the cycle of our suffering. How's it done? The minute our lives are no longer bound by grasping, we can consciously and spontaneously become radiant expressions of the Infinite. In our bodies this feels like peace and ease. Integrating this peace in...

ISmile295 – Reclaiming the Body

As spiritual practitioners we can often misplace our awareness, focussing too heavily on one or another aspect of being. We may overcompensate both intention and awareness in subtle ways, giving too much of our attention, for example, to our thinking or we can go the other way, giving too much attention to what we are feeling. But by balancing these two directional aspects of our awareness we naturally embody the very awakening that we hope to realize. Depending on your preferred translation...

ISmile294 – A Path of Non-Avoidance

In this evenings talk, Michael walks us through how we can allow for peace and freedom to burst through us. This powerful and natural shine permeates and has the opportunity to be shared among all of us as soon as we stop avoiding our lives and begin a disciplined meditation practice. Once we do we become a conscious expression of something beautiful and magnetic. We start seeing darkness as a beautiful offering for each of us to go deeper and fearlessly meet our lives. This offers us a chanc...

ISmile293 – Traps, Snares and Qualities That Bind

Whatever keeps us off of the cushion is what keeps us from awakening. At least this is one of Michael's most common refrains as he encourages a daily stillness practice. Why? "Because," as he says, "it loosens whatever is keeping us bound." Once this loosening takes on the characteristics of a deeper unraveling, our bondage becomes a choice rather than an addiction. This evening's Dharma talk takes this subject on in a couple of capacities. First, it approaches the ways that the ego can atte...

Retreat Video – Living From Abundance

Here are two of the four talks offered at our most recent Spring Retreat at the Mount Madonna Center entitled, Living From Abundance. Please come join us some time.

ISmile292 – Dancing with Challenges

What would it be like to be able to welcome any challenge as an invitation into awakening? Our relationship to our troubles determines the answer to this question. Are we avoiding anything? Are we at war? Harboring ill-will? Acting from desperation? Hungry for something, anything, other than what's actually happening? Are you going for pleasure instead of going for consciousness? Trying to find where pleasure and consciousness can coexist? The answers to these and other questions often arise...

ISmile291 – The Sin of Beauty

In this evening's Dharma talk, Michael addresses how beauty, and our sense of it, can be impediments to awakening. "It's not," he says, "that there is anything wrong with beauty. In fact, beauty is everywhere, all the time. The problem is that by labeling something as 'beautiful' we limit the potential expanse of its power with our definition. We miss the mark, or 'sin,' as we attempt to stabilize an experience of awe that feels so intense." Michael goes on to discuss the natural expression ...

ISmile290 – From Our Misery to the Mystery

In this Dharma talk, Michael addresses how the ego is more comfortable with its own misery than it is uncovering the mystery of existence. This presents some problems for most of us since we rarely have either the courage or the guidance to move past this kind of psychological or spiritual block. Failing to move past this block offers us no lasting solace. Working through this tendency, however, helps offer clarity of who and what we are as well as a deepening sense of purpose. The one thing...

Encore: ISmile105 – The Three Levels of Practice

This podcast was originally offered in February of 2006. ___ In tonight's talk, Michael discusses how our practice can be light, medium or deep. Deep practice takes us to the ragged edge of our personal limitations and in the process show us the view of the Impersonal. Questions and comments deal with consciously letting the Dharma get us wet; dealing with this practice as well as a partner who doesn't practice; and patience that comes with deep practice.

ISmile289 – Out of Pain, Wholeness

In this video podcast of Michael's most recent talk, Michael discusses how even in darkness, light can guide us. Perhaps the greatest desire for any of us, he suggests, is to be free of pain. But what happens in relationship to practice when we feel heavy with pain. It may be physical or emotional. And yet whatever disaster we might be experiencing helps to sharpen the very sword that cuts through our delusion. Engaging our lives at this level allows for us to deeply integrate our minds, our...

Encore: ISmile165 – The Egos Skin

This podcast was originally offered in August of 2007. ___ Can we become familiar with what the ego feels like? In this talk, Michael discusses uncovering the fundamental truth that is beyond name and form. When we feel resistance to this truth, we are feeling the skin of ego. When we get into a sangha, or group, of spiritual friends, the sensitivity of ego's skin increases. We begin to see ourselves in others; hear our interior dialogs from others' mouths; feel our own pain mirrored in the...

ISmile288 – The Ego As Delusion

In this Dharma talk, Michael challenges each of us to look for the source of the ego. In doing so, we find that the "eGO!" as his 3 year-old daughter refers to it, is simply the name we give to the mind in motion. This label isn't anything substantial unless we identify with it. Seeing the mind in motion, without clinging to any of it, helps us have an opportunity to stop the mind's tendency to attach and identify with its own motion as long as we engage sincerely in the practice of stillness...

ISmile287 – Getting Out of Love’s Way

In this video-taped Dharma talk, Michael McAlister discusses how beginning to objectify the experiences of both body and mind will help us to experience life and love more fully. Seeing, for example, that our sensations and perceptions are objects, allows for us to develop a clearer sense of what is sensing and what is perceiving. As this happens, our experience naturally broadens from a personal view of things, into an impersonal opening to the Infinite. Once this happens we are afforded an...

Encore: ISmile69 – The Three Stages of Practice: Recognition, Resistance, & Renunciation

This podcast was originally offered in August of 2005. ____ If it's all only Spirit, why should we meditate? Couldn't it be that meditation is designed to fail in getting us closer to what's already totally present? In this talk, Michael discusses these questions and suggests how practice unfolds along three stages. Beginning with Recognition, where we are essentially invited to the party, ego fuels our search. Following this, practitioners can often lose their footing when the "dark night ...

Encore Podcast – ISmile61 – At the Core of Everything is the Ninth Sense

This podcast was originally offered in June of 2005. ___ What is the Source of all things? In this talk, Michael pushes the limits of language by discussing the nature of Emptiness as it relates to the human experience. How is it that the experience of Emptiness is paradoxically so full, thus inspiring mystical teachings for millenia. And how does the experience of Emptiness relate to our physical senses as well as our sense of time and mind? What is beyond our sense of time and mind anyway...

Encore: ISmile85 – The New Relationship Between Time and Mind

ISmile286 – Radical Honesty and the Great Matter

In this video-taped Dharma talk, Michael McAlister explains how we can lie lives rooted in deep, or radical, honesty. Once we start to do this we can find that there is no longer a compulsion to either establish or cling to an identity. Once we lose our grip on our identity, or our identity loses its grip on us, we find that we can face, as we say in Zen, the Great Matter of living and dying with deeper peace. At this point of deep peace, we see that there is the potential to live without fe...

ISmile285 – In the Middle of Pain

In this Dharma talk, Michael discusses how we can begin to look at pain as an invitation to deepen our perspectives on how we live. This isn't always easy, but it's at the core of everyone's Dharma practice. When we know, in other words, that some disaster is immanent, can we, as Michael points out, "get ready for lots of stinging" in the moments prior to whatever event is coming? Along these lines, Michael's talk revolves around how getting on an authentic spiritual path usually is the resu...

ISmile284 – The Fierce Urgency of Now

In this Dharma talk, Michael McAlister starts by pointing out how the PBS NewsHour's Mark Shields helped contextualize the killings in Tuscon, Arizona. In doing so, we find that there may be some significant reminders of how tribal-centrism can be extended toward global-centrism if we allow our own hearts and minds to open fully and repeatedly. With this in mind, Michael points out how this corresponds in deep ways with what Dr. Martin Luther King spoke of in his "I Have a Dream" speech. For ...

ISmile283 – Buddhism’s Eight Winds Fanning the Fire of Resolve

In this Dharma talk, Michael McAlister offers his take on the "fire" needed to keep our spiritual life moving towards deeper and deeper levels of maturity. He suggests that these lives that we're leading are complete as they are and provide us with all the necessary tools needed to live the experiment that leads us to awakening, especially if we can cultivate a healthy relationship with the Eight Winds of experience: praise, blame, happiness, sadness, success, failure, pride and shame. Becom...

ISmile282 – The Eightfold Path

In this Dharma talk, Michael McAlister discusses the Buddhist version of supporting an embodied awakening: The Eightfold Path. This methodology, as articulated in Buddhist tradition, was the fourth of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths and shows us how to live a life free of suffering. Consideration is given to how these traditional instructions are built on wisdom, ethical conduct, and the cultivation of our mental development. We are offered direction from here as to how we can constructively ...

ISmile281 – Vid: The Open Heart

In this Dharma talk, Michael McAlister breaks form a bit. Instead of offering up pointers showing us a path to freedom, he describes how to best keep ourselves from ever developing an open heart. He also discusses how ego is not the root of all evil; how focussed attention on the activity of mind offers a compassionate response to all things; and how employing a witnessing awareness to all experience reveals a deep trust in the Universe. He also suggest that there are qualities that will blo...

ISmile280 – Cultivating a Beginner’s Mind

My teacher's teacher, Shunryu Suzuki, offered up this famous spiritual pearl: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few." While its meaning may appear to suggest that we need to cultivate a mind like that of a child in order to successfully walk the path, there is more to what he is saying. "Beginner's mind," at its core, is about allowing "not-knowing" to support our spiritual search. Instead of cultivating a sense of certitude, which only lead...

ISmile279 – Vid: How to Block Your Progress on the Spiritual Path

There are several things, according to Michael McAlister, that can get in the way of realization as we deepen our spiritual practice. Among the issues, sleepiness, insomnia, arrogance, fear, doubt, attachment, pain, restlessness, boredom, and avoidance. Getting caught by any of these experiences works against the potential of opening to a life sourced from an enlightened perspective. Learning to "Wow as we ow," as Michael says, helps us bring curiosity to our practice in ways that are truly h...

ISmile278 – Integrating Body, Mind and Practice

In this Dharma talk, Michael discusses the separation and anger he felt in relation to his teacher. At a very specific point during his practice, Michael learned that among the most important thing to do was to question the teaching. He realized that questioning his teacher was critical in moving his practice from an intellectual understanding into an exercise of both body and mind. Getting over-balanced in the area of mind, or in the area of body, distorts our practice. Awakening is not some...

ISmile277 – When The Bottom Falls Out From Underneath Us

In this Dharma talk, Michael discusses what's required when great doubt begins to pervade our practice as well as our experience. When it feels like we're dying inside and despair arises, he suggests that it is imperative that we keep going with our work, continually engaging an even deeper curiosity and wonder about what is actually happening in each moment. This kind of attention, rather than diminishing one's life force, or "spiritual mojo," can enhance our experience in ways where we expr...

ISmile276 – The Body, The Breath and Space

In this evening's Dharma talk, Michael presents his view on how the attention paid to the body and the breath offers us a path to an expanse beyond words. It is here we receive an invitation to the truth beyond name and form. The Holy, in other words, reveals itself in the mundane at this very moment of deep attention.

ISmile275 – These Awakenings Starts With Forgiveness

In this evening's Dharma talk, Michael suggests that an authentic spiritual path must begin with the simple act of forgiveness. Uncovering what we can't forgive allows for us to familiarize ourselves with the egoic blocks to deepening our practice as well as any potential for awakening.

ISmile274 – Why Am I Here?

In this Dharma talk, Michael addresses what it means to question our motives for participating in a practice with a teaching, teacher and group of spiritual friends. From here an alchemy begins to unfold where the lead of one's day-to-day can reveal itself as spiritual gold.

ISmile273 – Attending to Sangha

In this Dharma talk, Michael addresses what it means to be part of a sangha and how attending to this relationship can inform the deepening of our practice.

ISmile272 – Vid: The Gift of Negativity

In this video of a recent Dharma talk, Michael discusses how welcoming negativity and exploring its roots helps each of us uncover the spaciousness that is beyond all things.

ISmile271 – The Great Spiritual Questions

"When we see that clinging to the idea of freedom inhibits freedom, we start to evolve."

ISmile270 – Thoughts on Sanghapalooza

"Any authentic Truth must, by definition, show up beyond your definition of it or THIS definition of it."

ISmile268 – Vid: Truly Living Large

Enlightened egos are very high-maintenance. Very. High. Maintenance.

ISmile267 – Ox-herding and Such

I realized that I had an addiction to knowing. I had to know. I had to get it. This was the disaster that got me onto the path.