One of the striking things, given that this is the Buddha’s best- known discourse on loving-kindness, is that it is about a third of the way into the sutta before the Buddha even mentions loving- kindness. I think this is great, in the sense that loving-kindness is to be cultivated, but that there is also that which should be done to get to that point. We need to be skilled in goodness and know th…

Everything is created by our minds. The eyes see images, the ears hear sounds, the nose smells aromas, the tongue tastes flavors, the body feels sensations, and the heart experiences emotions. But the mind is aware of all these things. It knows them and it thinks about them, imagining them to be this or that. When our mindfulness and wisdom are strong, we can see these creations for ourselves. But…

Under the veneer of contentment, we are too busy to see what we are doing, too restless to stop or to keep our minds still. It isn’t just a shifting around so that we can find the right posture or the right set of conditions in life; it’s a deep inner angst. At first this sense of disquiet manifests as nascent feelings that we would never have allowed ourselves to feel before and that expose how w…

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…