The way out of suffering, as the Buddha taught, is cessation. Freedom from suffering comes through allowing that which has arisen to cease. It is as simple as that. In order to allow anything to cease, we must not interfere with it or try to get rid of it; we must allow it to go away. This means that we must be patient with it. So mettā is also a kind of patience, a willingness to exist with unple…

‘Od ton’ means patient endurance… “What is practice really all about? What’s the real practice?” There have always been a number of monks who say, ‘I don’t want to stay at Nanachat. It’s a good place when you start out, but it’s not where you can do the real practice. The real practice is over there…, the real practice is in a cave in Chiang Mai or whatever… The real practice is in this or that pl…

The Buddha gives a lot of emphasis to the value of patient endurance, and as Ajahn Amaro pointed out very adeptly one time, “bitter endurance is not patient endurance.” [See Ajahn Amaro: “Patient Endurance, A Critical Quality,” (22 August 2010) and “Patient Endurance, The Entrance to the Four Noble Truths,” (18 February 2011)] The perfection of being patient and enduring something is to bear with…

…a question that someone asked in one of the meditation workshops. She said she was noticing that as she grew older she tended to forget things; her mind is no longer so bright and clear. She asked, ‘How do you practise with this? I know that it’s not going to get any better; I can feel that my mind is going.’ After she had asked this question, there was an awesome hush in the room. I think quite…

We suffer largely because of the way we talk to ourselves. That’s what the message of the four noble truths is all about. It’s not that we suffer from sights, sounds, smells, tastes, or tactile sensations. We suffer because of the commentary we apply to these things. And a lot of meditation is learning to talk to yourself in new ways. In fact, the whole practice is about talking to yourself in new…

The Brahma Vihāras nurture our hearts by giving rise to peacefulness and coolness. They function as an antidote for the mental defilements, their purpose being none other than to counteract the kilesas. If our heart is full of defilements, we will tend to be selfish and inconsiderate, thinking only of our own benefit. But if we cultivate mettā towards others, we will have an antidote for any feeli…

Reflect on the sense of ‘I am’. Notice how it is always associated with some state (I am tired) or notion (I am from Singapore) or action (I am going to New York in the summer). How does your particular ‘I am’ feel when it’s associated with a state, notion or activity? Sometimes positive, sometimes negative, sometimes confident and sometimes uncertain? In summary, it’s changeable. Can you have any…

In practicing the Dhamma, if you don’t foster a balance between concentration and discernment, you’ll end up going wild in your thinking. If there’s too much work at discernment, you’ll go wild in your thinking. If there’s too much concentration, it just stays still and undisturbed without coming to any knowledge either. So you have to keep them in balance. Stillness has to be paired with discernm…

What the Buddha tells us in the Fire Sermon [(SN 35:28)], that the eye is burning, form is burning, eye consciousness is burning, eye contact is burning, the feeling arising from eye contact is burning, is that it’s not a picnic, not something that we want to be seeking. It is not something to be delighting in, and it is not something to be averse to. It is something to wake up to, something to re…

Energy is the third of the Seven Factors of Awakening. It’s also one of the Five Faculties, one of the Five Powers and a factor of the Eightfold Path. So the Buddha was very emphatic about energy. Fundamentally this goes back to the principle of what’s called kamma in his teachings. ‘Kamma’ literally means ‘action’, and the Buddha defined it as intentional action which has the potential to produce…