It’s worthwhile to watch the habits of desire and craving that keep creeping into the mind. Really notice and pay attention to desire, because it’s insidious. This isn’t meant as a commentary on anyone’s inability to recognize or understand desire or to work with it, but simply to say that it takes our concerted attention and a willingness to investigate to see how desire keeps creeping in. Most i…

Looking at experience in terms of the five aggregates helps us to focus our attention on what the Buddha says is our fundamental activity as beings: beings have to eat. This is how they continue to be. Without taking in food—physical, mental, and emotional—we couldn’t maintain our identity as beings. Now the Buddha wants us to perceive this feeding as suffering, because only when we get past this…

When there’s a conflict or a disagreement, we often just bounce off each other with our emotional reactions. Mostly we immediately pick up the other person’s emotional state, whether they’re afraid, aggressive or judgmental, for example. Often this doesn’t allow us to hear what that person has to say, even if it’s actually quite sensible. Before the argument even enters the rational part of our mi…

The practices that I have maintained all these years are not easy to do — they are extremely difficult. I have endured many hardships to test my determination and my stamina along the path. I have gone without food for many days. I have refused to lie down to sleep for many nights. Endurance became the food to nourish my heart and diligence became the pillow to rest my head. Try it for yourself. T…

For me, ‘faith’ is good and special enough. The main intent of this walk was to live in that; to walk solo across my native land without food or a means of obtaining it except the spontaneous generosity of people who didn’t know me. Furthermore it was a ‘tudong’, an ‘austere practice’ of carrying enough gear to stay reasonably warm, dry and clean, but with otherwise nothing much. At the end of tha…

…There’s a skillful way to adjust. There’s this phrase that comes up when the Buddha is talking about meditation practice: from time to time give attention to this or that quality. It comes in a few lists where the Buddha is talking about meditation. It is appropriate from time to time to check your posture, from time to time adjust the mind in various ways, adjust your effort, adjust how you’re f…

In comparison to most monasteries I’ve lived in before, there’s a real stable community and a consistency to the routine [at Abhayagiri]. People get locked into that and they’re not quite ready to make that shift…the next moment with mindfulness and clear comprehension and attentiveness to detail. Well, what’s happening? What changed? What didn’t change? That’s going to be the theme of adapting to…

All these things depend on cooperation, which is probably why the Buddha instituted the Kathina to begin with. If you look in the Viniya, there’s not much explanation (about Kathina). It doesn’t say who was the first person to think of the Kathina or how it came about. It’s a very unusual section in the Viniya. The word, Kathin or Kathina, in Pali, means a frame, like the frame they use in a quilt…

When we practice mindfulness of the body, we focus on the decay and ending of our body. We focus on seeing that the body does not endure and that it can’t be what we call our self. Every day death keeps happening to us, but it’s a hidden way of dying, not the obvious death of the body. One can see it in the fact that things change. We die from being a child when we become adults. This too is death…

The big difficulty for human beings is the vital factor of renunciation. However, as we develop the good heart, we find we can relinquish. As we feel good in ourselves, we have fewer needs. Also when we feel good in ourselves, we don’t mind taking things on. So we can renounce things not in a dismissive or puritanical way, but because the clinging and neediness is alleviated. There are different k…