Lisa Dale Miller starts this episode with an explanation of why the Groundless Ground Podcast has been on hiatus for the last year. Then the episode presents a dharma talk Lisa gave at Marin Sangha one month ago. Her talk is a reminder that every moment is an invitation to decrease the mass of human suffering by seeding the world with at least one more quiescent, wise, and compassionate mind committed to non-harming. Lisa explicates why cultivation of Bodhicitta is the ultimate path to accomplishing that aim, right in the midst of ordinary daily life.

Longchenpa's Finding Rest in the Nature of Mind

Lisa Dale Miller, LMFT, LPCC, SEP specializes in working with high-performing professionals (engineers, scientists, executives, physicians/psychologists, first responders) struggling with unresolved traumatic experiences: particularly medical trauma, C-PTSD, combat and war trauma, moral injury, high-impact injuries, burnout, workplace harassment, traumatic grief, and challenging life transitions.
Lisa authored Effortless Mindfulness: Genuine mental health through awakened presence a highly regarded textbook on Buddhist psychology for mental health professionals. Lisa has been an outpatient clinician for the VA San Jose, has taught a variety of Mindfulness-based Interventions, and is an AAMFT Clinical Fellow. Lisa is a Buddhist teacher and has been a yogic and Buddhist meditation practitioner for over four decades.

This is a recording of a dharma talk Lisa Dale Miller gave March 19, 2003 at Marin Sangha. 
Recently neuroscientist Richard Davidson reiterated a long-held tenet of Tibetan Buddhism that all human beings share the same wish to be happy and free of suffering, and that this wish emerges from innate basic goodness. This goodness is often viewed in Mahāyāna and Vajrayana Buddhism as an expression of Buddhanature, the fundamental awakened mind of all beings. There is not much in the Pāli Canon to support the notion of innate goodness. However, the Buddha did teach unconditioned mind—a mind purified through contemplative effort, not an innately awakened mind. This dharma talk compares these two frameworks and explores the cultivation of ethical goodness using specific suttas and findings from affective neuroscience. And I am joined by a co-teacher ChatGPT, which explicates historical references to goodness and investigates its own sense of how to engage in ethical conduct. 

Lisa's catalogue of Dharma Talks can be found on the Groundless Ground and those done prior to 2020 are available on my clinical website. 

Psychologist, researcher, and executive Cassandra Vieten and I dialogue about a wide range of interventions that can shift the mental health crisis into a mental health renaissance. Cassie’s many years of offering patients empirically-based, mind-body tools for sustainable transformation, has taken place at several renowned academic medical institutions and greatly contributed to psychology’s integration of embodied, spiritually-oriented interventions for human flourishing such as: meditation, qigong and tai chi, being in nature, ritual, spiritual exploration, and most recently, psychedelics. This is a jam-packed episode full of practical information for health professionals seeking easy ways to facilitate patient well-being.

Watch Cassie's TED Talk!

 Build Your Ecosystem!

Cassandra Vieten is Director of Research and Associate Scientist at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Executive Director of the John W. Brick Mental Health Foundation, co-founder and Clinical Psychology Director at the Psychedelics and Health Research Initiative at UCSD, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. She is a licensed clinical psychologist. Her research has focused on spirituality and health, transformative experiences and practices, the development of mindfulness-based interventions for emotional well-being, and development of media technologies to inspire awe. She received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She was a Scientist at the Mind-Body Medicine Research Group for 12 years, and worked at the Institute of Noetic Sciences for 18 years. She has authored three books and has published numerous articles in scientific journals.