When we first look closely at the human mind, we may experience suffering from our approach to the practice itself. We may struggle to make peace with ourselves. We may experience tiredness or confusion. We may suffer – without understanding the roots of suffering, without knowing how to let it go, how to let it die its own natural death. Why is this so? It is because the mind looks for safety, an…

Training your mind is like training yourself to master a sport. Part of the training is focused in the practice sessions, i.e. what you’re doing right here as you’re meditating or as you’re doing walking meditation–the skills you want to work on, because we are working on skills. We try to develop Right View, Right Resolve, all the way down through Right Concentration. There’s Right Concentration…

With a little bit more practice, you find that you can stay here, stay balanced here more solidly than you could floating around in your old habits. Be as immediate as possible with each breath. Sense it as soon as it comes in, as soon as it stops. Try to sense any sense of discomfort that comes when the breath begins to get a little bit too long as you pull too long, and as you try to squeeze it…

We have all the different sense organs: the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, body, and mind. If you review those, you’ll see that there’s a particular logic in that sequence. The phenomena that arise in the eye are distant. There’s space. They’re out there. You can see things that don’t see you. You’re removed from them. The eye is very good for the hunter because it’s good at sharply defining…

The Buddha delineated four successive stages of awakening. We don’t have to awaken all at once, so it’s not too overwhelming…Maybe some people do have an instant or spontaneous awakening, but I think that even if they do, that experience still requires a certain development and filling out. One can have moments of clarity and glimpses of truth, but unless the experience becomes really grounded in…

Today is Friday the 13th, and by tradition some people believe that it’s an unlucky day. Many people have different ideas of why Friday the 13th became known as an unlucky day. In the Thai tradition and the Asian tradition in general, there are lucky days, unlucky days, auspicious and inauspicious times. Ajahn Chah used to say that whatever day we are doing something wholesome, that is an auspicio…

We know when we find the middle – there’s a resting, a clarity, there’s an understanding on a very intuitive level and we can just be with things the way they are. Then the tension and conflict eases out, unravels, dissipates. The more we find that ‘way of being’ (it’s not a static position, it’s a living, responsive, sensitive way of being), the more we begin to recognise it intuitively, and some…

I’d like to propose that the practice of Dhamma is one that has two dimensions – a dimension of depth and a dimension of breadth. Through our lives as practitioners of the Dhamma, there are times when we want to apply ourselves, or be able to apply ourselves, to one of these dimensions – of breadth or depth. There are times when we will be able to devote ourselves to one or the other, situations t…

It would seem obvious that any detailed discussion of a person’s life must, sooner or later, focus on his or her personality. It tends to be assumed that it is in the personality that the essence of a person is to be found. But this apparent truism requires certain qualifications in the case of liberated beings, or those practising for liberation. In such cases, the personality is fluid. Personali…

Once we undertake this practice, it can take a long time just to get to know ourselves, to start to look inwardly and get to know all the forces that are pushing and pulling us. We get to know our own ways and means of being in the world, and of taking on the practice, the discipline and the meditation techniques. We see our own tactics of mind in relationship to pleasure and pain – we see what we…