So the Buddha taught that we should learn to go against the grain and skilfully develop patient endurance, with mindfulness well established and our minds well focused, especially in situations that we have never encountered before. The process is similar to catching animals in the jungle. Catching a wild animal is not easy. Until one can catch one, one needs to learn a lot about its behaviour and…

When I started going on retreats in my early twenties, I’d find myself getting really angry with whoever was teaching yoga. I didn’t consider myself a particularly angry person, but the yoga teacher always made me very angry. Through the stretching exercises, the anger that was locked away in my body started to wake up. At some point, I finally put it together—it wasn’t the fault of the yoga teach…

Centuries ago a seeker, one who searches for a way beyond birth and death, was wandering through a remote valley of one of the many tributaries of the Ganges river. He had been wandering for six years and in the course of that time had studied under teachers, developed meditation and strengthened his considerable resolve. Most recently he had been part of a group of six ascetics whose view was tha…

Muditā is the quality of sympathetic joy. This one has always interested me greatly–mostly because it was something that I often seemed to lack. I used to suffer enormously from jealousy, and there seemed to be nothing I could do about it. It would just come, and the more I tried to disguise it, the worse it would get. I could really spoil things for people, just through this horrible thing that u…

Question: What’s peacefulness like? Answer: What is confusion? Well, peacefulness is the end of confusion. The forest is peaceful, why aren’t you? You hold onto things causing your confusion. Let nature teach you. Hear the bird’s song; then let go. If you know nature, you’ll know Dhamma. If you know Dhamma, you’ll know nature. These reflections by Ajahn Chah are from the book, No Ajahn Chah, (pdf)…

The mental consciousness creates fundamental structures that support further differentiation. These structures are so well established, or conjured up so immediately, that they become realities. The basic structures are time and space, self and other. They arise so immediately that we do not believe that they are created. I don’t seem to create the future. The future is ‘out there’. ‘There is such…

[From a Morning Reflection in 2013] With many people away, it’s so quiet I can hear the water dripping over the sound of our breathing. We can have our own little retreat here today, which is always the way it is here regardless of the day. We can use every opportunity to practice mindfulness—to be aware of where our body is and what our mind is doing and ask ourselves, “Is this a skillful state o…

Each one of us is a blade of grass. We want all the blades of grass on the planet to be healthy, but it can seem overwhelming. There have never been this many people on this planet in the known history of human civilization. The mind boggles; it can’t cope with so many blades. But this one blade of grass is something I have some control over. This one conscious being is something I can work with.…

We have to learn to open up to the world around us. It’s one of the last things we do, actually. We normally have an unawakened relationship with the world around us. We pay attention to it just to manipulate it, to find things for ourselves in it. We even talk about living our life as if life is something separate from us. We try to get ‘on top of life’ or get ‘ahead in life’. The world of nature…