So work with perceptions such as craving (taṇhā) and ask yourself, “What is craving?” Moreover, bring up the perceptions of bhava- taṇhā (the desire to become something), vibhava-taṇhā (the desire to get rid of something), and kāma-taṇhā (sense desire). What are these things and how are they operating in the mind? When and how do they cease? What does cessation mean? What does it mean to…

So once you catch yourself breathing uncomfortably in line with a particular assumption, turn it around to see what sensations the new assumption highlights. Try staying with those sensations as long as you can, to test them. If, compared to your earlier sensations associated with the breath, they’re easier to stay with, if they provide a more solid and spacious grounding for concentration, the as…

The theme of friendship is an important one to be considering as we live in the world. We were born into this world. We have a shorter or longer lifespan in this world. We don’t live separately from other people. We have the association with others as human beings. And, the friendships that we make are the ones that sustain us, support us, give us a sense of connection to each other. …It is the qu…

When discernment arises, you can abandon your defilements. As your discernment grows, your behavior will change. You’ll abandon your old ways. It’s like going into the forest to look for fruit. At first you find some fruit that’s not especially good, but even though it’s sour, you take it. You carry it in your basket until you find fruits that are better than that. You throw the old fruits out of…

‘Not-doing’ or refraining, is a kind of creativity. This morning I was speaking to a group of art students. I mentioned to them how much I admire Chinese brush paintings. In these works of art only a very small portion of the canvas is painted on; the effect and the power of the picture is conveyed by the relationship between the painted form or the painted area, and that which is not painted. In…

Many Westerners, when new to Buddhism, are struck by the uncanny familiarity of what seems to be its central concepts: interconnectedness, wholeness, spontaneity, ego-transcendence, non-judgmentalism, and integration of the personality. They tend not to realize that the concepts sound familiar because they are familiar. To a large extent, they come not from the Buddha’s teachings but from their hi…

Since you have come to ask for forgiveness, I don’t want to speak about issues from the past, as these are things that lie behind us. Actually there isn’t much to settle between us in this ceremony of asking for forgiveness anyway. Still, a ceremony like this is useful on the level of your personal practice. It affects the attitudes that you maintain and carry along throughout the training of your…

So awakeness, then, is learning to listen and trust in the most simple state of being. It’s not jhāna or absorption in anything. It’s pure attention. So if you trust in this purity, there is no fault in it. There are no faults in purity, are there? It’s perfect. There’s no impurity. This is where to trust, in this attentiveness to the present. Once you try to find it, then you start going into do…

…Meditation is a skill, and mastering it should be enjoyable in the same way that mastering any other rewarding skill can be. The Buddha said as much to his son, Rāhula: “When you see that you’ve acted, spoken, or thought in a skillful way—conducive to happiness while causing no harm to yourself or others—take joy in that fact, and keep on training.” Of course, saying that meditation should be enj…

In practice, there needs to be balance between proactive applications and relaxation. The proactive applications consist of creating something or placing the mind onto an object such as body or breathing. You can do that by lifting your attention with a thought: ‘Where is the body now? … Where is the breath now? … What is breathing out like now?’ You deliberately bring that thought up. That’s why…