When the world feels divided and heavy, it’s easy to forget the basic goodness that still surrounds us—and lives within us. In this week’s talk, guest teacher Ajahn Nisabho invites us to rediscover that innate brightness of heart.

He shares vivid teachings from the Buddha’s “Gold Washer” sutta—on refining our thoughts, words, and actions as a craftsperson would purify gold—and reflects on how virtue, forgiveness, and loving-kindness transform both our relationships and our inner life. A beautiful reminder that awakening is not escape from the world, but learning to meet it with a steady, undefended heart.

Click here to join the free Wednesday Meditations – which are open to everyone!

Talk: Finding Brightness and Goodness in a Troubled World

Timecodes & main topics:

• 02:30 – Seeing Goodness in the World: Returning to the “bright garden” beneath the headlines and reclaiming appropriate attention (yoniso manasikāra).
• 05:13 – Refining the Heart: Shifting from a moral lens of right/wrong to a visceral sense of the beautiful and unbeautiful in our actions.
• 09:43 – The Gold Washer Sutta: Using the Buddha’s metaphor of purifying gold to cleanse coarse, moderate, and fine impurities of heart.
• 13:10 – Everyday Virtue: Finding mindfulness in small acts—folding laundry, speaking kindly, and refraining from gossip.
• 17:16 – Cleansing Anger and Ill Will: Cultivating forgiveness, guarding the heart from resentment, and starting each day with loving awareness.
• 21:42 – Learning from Difficult People: How challenging relationships become our teachers in patience, humility, and compassion.
• 25:43 – Protecting the Heart in a Polarized World: Engaging without hatred, taking “news fasts,” and remembering our deeper duty to love.
• 28:51 – The Five Kinds of Loss: Wealth, health, relatives, right view, and virtue—and why the last two matter most.
• 31:02 – Remembering the Gold Beneath: Letting go of impurity to reveal the luminous nature of mind and heart.

A Meditation: Letting Go Into Death

In this profound guided meditation from Ajahn Nisabho, we’re invited to imagine our final moments—not as something grim, but as a sacred opportunity to let go of everything we cling to. Through gently releasing possessions, identities, and even the body itself, the heart grows lighter and the mind more luminous. What’s left is a radiant stillness—touched by love, forgiveness, and the simple wish, may all beings be well.

After finishing college in 2012, Ajahn Nisabho left his native Washington to go forth as a Buddhist monk in Thailand. He received full ordination the following spring under Ajahn Anan, a senior disciple of renowned meditation master, Ajahn Chah, and spent the following years training in forest monasteries around the world with contemporary masters such as Ajahn Anan, Ajahn Pasanno, and Ajahn Jayasaro. In the summer of 2021, he returned to Seattle to plant the first seeds of Clear Mountain Monastery.