Month: Jun 2019

Living Without Resistance

If you know anything about Buddhism then the phrase ‘letting go’ is nothing new to you. We all know that letting go can be hard, but sometimes we don’t even realise that we haven’t let go because we can’t recognise that we are holding on to something. We might think that we have no problems … Continue reading Living Without Resistance →

Love For All Beings

‘You don’t believe in God though, do you? Or reincarnation, I mean that’s just silly.’ For Westerners coming to Buddhism, often from a background of a theistic religion like Christianity or Judaism, the initial appeal of it is that you don’t need to believe in anything. Jaded by their experience of the dogma and the … Continue reading Love For All Beings →

The Incredible Smallness of Being

I used to have a lot of interesting ideas about what meditation was going to be like when I finally got the hang of it. No doubt my views were coloured by my Christian upbringing because I used to think there would be these ‘road to Damascus’ type moments when I would suddenly be overcome … Continue reading The Incredible Smallness of Being →

Which Bus Are You Catching?

The five precepts are the most basic Buddhist practice and yet working with them can be anything but simple. These five directions - to not kill, not steal, not have inappropriate sexual relationships, not lie, and not drink or take drugs that cause carelessness - are the foundation of a Buddhist practice. When the Buddha … Continue reading Which Bus Are You Catching? →

How Bored Are Your Elbows?

It’s a strange question to ask but sometimes wondering how bored your elbows are can be a useful way to break yourself out of a negative loop and get a bit of perspective. It’s not as absurd as it sounds and it does work, not just as a distraction tactic but it also allows us … Continue reading How Bored Are Your Elbows? →

5 Hours of Nothing

It would be nice in meditation practice if it was easy to see when we make improvements, like adding another 5kg on the weight stack at the gym, but the reality is that we very rarely see the changes happening in real time. In many cases we don’t even realise something has changed for us … Continue reading 5 Hours of Nothing →

Recognising Peace

Peace is one of the aims of meditation but at the start of our practice we can struggle to believe that we have achieved any kind of peace. This is simply because we cannot see it yet. In my previous post I talked about the importance of cultivating joy from our practice and one of … Continue reading Recognising Peace →

Renunciation and Joy

I was talking to someone recently about practice and the subject of renunciation came up. This is a common topic of discussion among Buddhist practitioners, and little wonder since the message we seem to get so often is that we need to give everything up. The most basic guidelines for living, the five precepts, for … Continue reading Renunciation and Joy →

Coming Back From Retreat

Having just come back from a 5 day retreat myself the question that we often have about how can we maintain our retreat experience when we return to our ordinary lives is fresh in my mind. It is a question that is asked of the teacher on virtually every retreat, but yet there is never … Continue reading Coming Back From Retreat →