I remember the first experiences Luang Por Liem had with his heart difficulties in Thailand. Apparently the condition had been going on for quite some time. He had symptoms of fatigue and probably shortness of breath, among other things. It wasn’t until it was quite progressed that he did anything about it. When asked why it took him so long to look into it, his response was something like: “I tho…
Compassion in action means working with the painful conditions in ourselves and others, and seeing how they mingle. Often a period in our life is not just one single shade of pleasure or one single shade of pain. In many if not most instances we experience mixed feelings, and sometimes a difficult condition, something that we would never have chosen, ends up bringing immense riches with it. Even w…
“Kondanna was my teacher. I had the good fortune to study shiatsu with Barry at the San Francisco School of Massage. He really did teach body-work as nothing less than a spiritual practice. He said the heart of our work is simply to offer our presence: ‘Don’t push, just use the weight of your own body. Don’t diagnose, just be aware. Don’t try to help, but also don’t turn away. Just be with the per…
All of these things have been true ever since before we investigated them, but the defilements have closed our eyes to them. Even though we see them, we don’t see them for what they are. Even though filth fills the body, the defilements deny it entirely and turn it into something beautiful — and we believe them, without looking at the Dhamma that’s waving its arms at us, ready to help us at all ti…
When you apply this story to the Dhamma, it becomes a lesson worth remembering. If you’re not loyal to your meditation object or to yourself, if you forget the breath you’re meditating on with buddho, buddho, and let your mind go wandering off in thoughts and concepts, it’s as if you’ve abandoned the monk you’re supposed to look after. You don’t follow him; you don’t act the role of his student as…
Throughout the day it is helpful for us to recollect that we are a community of alms mendicants. We rely on what is offered to us as gifts of goodwill: robes, alms food, shelter, and medicine—the four requisites. Traditionally, in Thai monasteries, the monastic community brings the requisites to mind as part of its formal morning and evening chanting. The chants encourage the monastics to ask them…
If it so happens that while we’re trying to maintain that sense of ease in the heart, disturbances come in to interfere, making the mind distracted and restless, we should remember that we don’t have to look for that lost sense of ease anywhere else. Remember: wherever there’s restlessness is where there is stillness. We have to be alert to the preoccupations that have put the mind out of shape. W…
Yesterday at teatime, we were talking about sampajañña, clear comprehension, which is a quality we can reflect on in our daily practice. When the Buddha speaks about mindfulness— sati—he rarely treats mindfulness as an isolated quality. It’s usually in conjunction with some other quality—particularly, clear comprehension, sati-sampajañña. Without clear comprehension, our mindfulness tends to b…
In learning to work with grasping – taking hold of opinions and views – we can learn to receive, accept and acknowledge another person’s mood, to know and be aware of it, but recognize in addition that we have a choice, a bridge we may or may not cross: ‘Do we choose to join in with that person’s mood or to leave it alone?’ It’s very helpful in these situations to develop body awareness, using our…
To reiterate: the main teaching on conceptual proliferation or papañca, the process where the mind runs away and how that happens, is in Sutta 18 of the Majjhima Nikāya, the Madhupiṇḍika Sutta. The sequence begins with a sense-contact: there’s a physical sensation or a thought floats into the mind. That contact leads to feeling, vedanā, which in Buddhism is not an emotion, but more like the ra…
