When we’re engaged in a lot of activity, we can become so focused on the details of what we’re doing that we forget there’s an element of generosity and goodness in our actions. When Ajahn Sumedho was a young monk, Luang Por Chah recommended that he recollect his good qualities. Ajahn Sumedho couldn’t understand what Luang Por was talking about because his mind was quite busy and filled up with ne…

Offering a morning reflection like this is a bit like planting a seed. What is said needs to be listened to with attention, care, and an open mind. When that happens, the seed has been planted in good soil. If the mind is not attentive or mindful, if it’s off dreaming or thinking, then it gets no benefit from the reflection. But if the mind is attentive, focused, and keen to extract value, then ev…

As we engage in activity, we can ground our awareness in the body and use it as a helpful anchor for our practice. We do this by having a tactile sense of contact with the ground, contact with physical movement, and contact with the material world around us. This brings awareness into the body, but it’s also important how this awareness is held. The Buddha’s way of teaching and training is through…

In one of the Dhamma talks Ajahn Chandako gave recently, he said the best way that we, as monastics, can support people in the world, support ourselves, and support the people who support us, is to develop the monastery and develop our individual practices. We can do this by investigating our tendencies and mind states to see whether we are moving toward contentment and communal harmony or if we a…

There is a skillful and beautiful Buddhist tradition for families and friends of someone who has passed away. The family members and friends come to the monastery and make offerings that support the monastic community. They receive puñña, merit from these offerings, and they dedicate that merit to the deceased, in whatever state of being he or she may have moved on to. In countries like Thailand,…

I was thinking about an aspect of our practice, right speech, and reflecting on the power of speech to affect us all. In some ways it affects us even more than bodily actions, which we think of as the coarsest way of acting out a mental condition. Speech can have an even broader effect because the number of people who can hear spoken words is greater than the number of people who can observe someb…

For both monastics and laypeople visiting the monastery, it is helpful to reflect on sustenance, what it is that sustains us materially. Laypeople offer food to the monastery, and we eat this food. They work some eight hours a day, five days a week or more, at a job that can often be unpleasant. It’s hard work, and they call it work because it is work. For most people the mind inclines toward not…

On the winter solstice I led a daylong retreat at Spirit Rock with the theme, “Maximum Darkness.” We investigated the experiences of death, loss, and sadness. It was a suitably dingy, gray, wet day, appropriate to that dolorous subject. For many years, one of the exercises I used in my meditation—and a theme I had others use on this daylong retreat—was to imagine the current sitting I was doing to…

As we did with conducting the recent ordination—thinking through things a bit, planning a little—we’re developing a sense of circumspection as we attend to whatever circumstances we’re in. We do this by asking ourselves, How can I fit into this situation? How can I be skillful, effective, and composed? Sometimes people can misunderstand how to apply the Buddha’s teachings on being present in the m…

Several nights ago I gave a talk on the ten pāramīs, qualities that are helpful for cultivation and development: generosity, virtue, renunciation, wisdom, effort, truthfulness, resolution, loving-kindness, patience, and equanimity. Each is helpful to bring up as an alternative to a particular difficult or obstructive state present in the mind. As a preliminary step, we can ask ourselves questions…