"To study emptiness means to accept without resisting, to not push away from the emptiness that's within us and try to fill up our sense of longing and deficiency. It's to sit and say, 'Let me feel that emptiness and not try to fill it right away.' When we stop running and feel that, then... Continue Reading →
The key to wise thought is to sense the energy state behind the thought. If we pay attention, we will notice that certain thoughts are produced by fear and the small sense of self. With them will be clinging, rigidity, unworthiness, defensiveness, aggression, or anxiety. We can sense their effect on the heart and the... Continue Reading →
Repeated thoughts and stories are almost always fueled by an unacknowledged emotion or feeling underneath. These unsensed feelings are part of what brings the thought back time and again. Future planning is usually fueled by anxiety. Remembering the past is often fueled by regret, or guilt, or grief. Many fantasies arise as a response to... Continue Reading →
We are so quick to judge one another. And just as we are hard on others we are even harder on ourselves. With mindfulness, our natural compassion grows. We can see that we are all carrying our own burden of tears. You and everyone you meet are sharing in some measure of the pain present... Continue Reading →
Many sorrows of the world arise when the thinking mind is disconnected from the heart. In meditation we can reconnect with our heart and discover an inner sense of spaciousness, unity, and compassion underneath all the conflicts of thought. The loving heart allows for the stories and ideas, the fantasies and fears of the mind... Continue Reading →
In undertaking a spiritual life, what matters is simple: We must make certain that our path is connected with our heart. In the end, spiritual life is not a process of seeking or gaining some extraordinary condition or special powers. In fact, such seeking can take us away from ourselves.In beginning a genuine spiritual journey,... Continue Reading →
We have to develop a very open loving attitude in our relationships with people. With everybody we meet, whether they are nice to us or not, we must have that initial feeling of “May you be well and happy”. Just a good feeling. It doesn’t mean we have to be stupid or that we can’t... Continue Reading →
In undertaking a spiritual life, what matters is simple: We must make certain that our path is connected with our heart. In the end, spiritual life is not a process of seeking or gaining some extraordinary condition or special powers. In fact, such seeking can take us away from ourselves.In beginning a genuine spiritual journey,... Continue Reading →
Much of our mental suffering comes from how tightly we hold our beliefs. In the monastery my teacher Ajahn Chah used to smile and ask, "Is it true?" He wanted us to learn to hold our thoughts lightly.Within the stillness of meditation we learn to observe how words and images arise and then vanish. When... Continue Reading →
Because experience happens so quickly, habitual responses can come out of our mouth before we know it. It helps to train ourselves to pause before our response. This is called the sacred pause. Before we speak, we can examine our motivation. Is our motivation one of compassion and concern for everyone? Or do we want... Continue Reading →
We have the capacity to be awake and to see the world as it is with a graciousness and an understanding.As the poet Mary Oliver writes, "To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends... Continue Reading →
You are bigger than your wounds. Even though we all want to be happy, often we don’t know how. You are born radiant, a child of the earth, innocent, open, and filled with wonder. As Wordsworth describes, we arrive “trailing clouds of glory.” Then as you grow, you find yourself vulnerable and, inevitably, you experience... Continue Reading →
Among the most central of all Buddhist psychological principles are the Four Noble Truths, which begin by acknowledging the inevitable suffering in human life. This truth, too, is hard to talk about in modern culture, where people are taught to avoid discomfort at any cost, where “the pursuit of happiness” has become “the right to... Continue Reading →
When fear arises, name it softly and experience what it does to the breath, to the body, how it affects the heart. Notice the sensations and ideas that accompany it, the scary stories it tells. When we work with the fearful mind, we will initially become afraid. However, at some point, if we open our... Continue Reading →
When we carefully observe our thoughts, we discover that they are not in our control—we swim in an uninvited constant stream of memories, plans, expectations, judgments, regrets. Often the root of these movements of mind is dissatisfaction. We seem to want both endless excitement and perfect peace. But instead of being served by our thinking,... Continue Reading →
As we let go and still see others suffer, the heart fills with compassion. So much suffering is human-caused. We awaken to a poignancy and tenderness beyond our own personal injuries. One Zen master calls this caring “the tears of the way.” Our personal suffering diminishes, but our awareness of the sorrow and pain in... Continue Reading →
The trust expressed by Ajahn Chah comes whenever our consciousness rests in the eternal present. “From where I sit,” he said, “nobody comes and no one goes.” “In the middle way, there is no one who is strong or weak, young or old, no one who is born and no one who dies. This is... Continue Reading →
Each of us has our own measure of pain. Sometimes the pain we suffer is great and obvious; sometimes it is subtle. Our pain can reflect the coldness of our families, the trauma of our parents, the stultifying influence of modern society. As a result, we often feel that we have been cast out. To... Continue Reading →
Repeated thoughts and stories are almost always fueled by an unacknowledged emotion or feeling underneath. These unsensed feelings are part of what brings the thought back time and again. Future planning is usually fueled by anxiety. Remembering the past is often fueled by regret, or guilt, or grief. Many fantasies arise as a response to... Continue Reading →
Mindfulness training wakes us up from the trance of delusion. Mindfulness shifts us out of fantasy into seeing clearly. Without mindfulness, the deluded mind habitually reacts, unconsciously grasping pleasant experiences and rejecting unpleasant ones. Harder to see, delusion ignores neutral experience. When things are neutral, we get bored and spaced out because we are so... Continue Reading →
