The differentiation between right and wrong is an especially meaningful one for us. With that comes success, failure, praise, blame, reward or punishment: there’s a big charge around getting it right or getting it wrong. Meanwhile direct experience – thoughts, sensations, emotions – is just what happens. It’s not based on right or wrong. Its sole fundamental quality is that it just happens. Our co…

The Pāli Canon has a reputation for being humorless. And it’s easy to see why. In some of its passages, the Buddha seems to regard humor in a bad light. For instance, in the Wailing Discourse (AN 3:107) he refers to “laughing excessively, showing one’s teeth,” as a form of childishness, and counsels that a monk, when feeling joy in the Dhamma, should simply smile. His instructions to Rāhula in (…

A common set of teachings the Buddha gives are the five spiritual faculties: faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration and wisdom: saddhā, viriya, sati, samādhi, paññā. These are things to be working on and cultivating. One can be looking at them as qualities to be working on in a linear way. First you lay a foundation for a sense of faith, confidence, trust, and when one does that there is some e…

What would you like to go out with? What would you like to finish your life with? Fault finding? Guilt? Incrimination? Anxiety? Blaming people? Feeling fed up? Or would you like to go out with feeling: Thanks. It’s been great. It’s been OK. It’s doesn’t matter. Let it go. That’s fine with me. Good Luck. I’m not going to hold on to that. That’s the choice, isn’t it? It’s OK. It doesn’t matter. Forg…

[From a Morning Reflection, September 2013] There is a fairly well-known sutta where the Buddha indicates that one who contemplates death about every few seconds develops mindfulness of death heedfully, with diligence, while one who contemplates death every few minutes or more develops mindfulness of death heedlessly, with sluggishness (AN 8.73). It only takes two or three seconds for someone to d…

We can easily be carried away by the desire to perfect tools or means for practice. It’s almost as if we’re focusing so much on the hammer that we’ve forgotten the piece of wood we’re working on. We focus on all the tools in the workshop, and we forget the piece of furniture we’re making. Not exactly the best analogy, perhaps a bit masculine for a nun, but sometimes I think of my mind as a worksho…

We need to train and develop when we practise. Any aspect of the practice relies on this training. It relies on doing things over and over. There are certain qualities in the life of an anagarika, one who isn’t bound to a home, that the Buddha called treasures. They are valuable goods. You probably know some of them. One of them has to do with our body – it is what the Buddha called kayasamvara, r…

You have a valuable treasure within you—the treasure of being a human being. So you have to look after this treasure until it grows more complete, until it becomes the treasure of the heavenly realms, the treasure of nibbāna. Look after this treasure. It’s hard to look after if you don’t know how to use it, if you don’t know how to take care of it. If you’re not discerning, this treasure can turn…

The Buddha said there are three points to check before we do something: ‘This is for my welfare’, ‘This for the welfare of others’ and ‘It leads to nibbāna, [Majjhima Nikāya 19]’, which means it leads to letting go, to release, to non-compulsiveness; it leads to the mind’s becoming less feverish or gripped and finally towards peace, towards ceasing of this inner compulsiveness – however you want…

The Middle Way is much misunderstood in the West. People think it means the easy and convenient way of practice. But that idea of the path is merely the way of the kilesas; the way of mental defilements like laziness and complacency. Effort is difficult because it goes directly against the pull of the kilesas. There is an innate desire to just relax or to go into some pursuit that you feel comfort…