Q: Can you speak about working with fear and loss of ego identity, fear and death? A: That’s one of the places where loving-kindness is a very skillful meditation and exercise because that sense of fear easily comes up with the loss of the familiar, with the uncertainty of where to place one’s attention. What can one trust as one starts to see? Body: can’t rely on that. Feelings, perceptions, thou…

The mental pain which some people have to endure can be even worse than physical torment. We should consider carefully whether the spiritual techniques that we pick up are in fact designed to address disruptive mental turmoil. We wouldn’t, for instance, encourage someone to go and see a dietician if we knew that they were recovering from a broken leg and what they needed was physiotherapy. When th…

The word ‘joy’ is my translation of the Pali word pīti. Normally it’s translated as ‘rapture’, but rapture may sound a bit too exotic or exalted. Rapture is similar to ‘ecstasy’ – using that word might attract a different set of readers or listeners! Using the translation ‘joy’, I think, makes it more accessible. But of course, pīti is not limited just to the ordinary, everyday experience of joy…

A topic that aroused a good deal of interest at the latest Vipassana Teachers’ Conference (April [2017] at IMS) was ‘the sacred’. As in ‘What is it?’ ‘Is it a useful reference?’ ‘How do we teach it?’ The interest centred around the distinction between meditation as a system that one does and the meditative domain that can, over time, open. There thought and the world of the senses dissolve, and th…

Also, this particular society conditions us to be very competitive. We’re brought up to try to be the best, so we put a lot of effort into doing well at school, doing well in sport; there are various values which are held to be particularly important. For example, when I was a child a lot of importance was placed on IQ (Intelligence Quotient). One Christmas my younger sister was given a book about…

In our culture we are programmed to stand out, to be special. It’s considered very important to have a ‘personality’ that’s special in some way. However, in fact this is an expression of ignorance, the first factor in the chain. We haven’t really understood that each of us – and all of existence – is simply part of a large number of interconnected phenomena that blend together. We put a lot of ene…

Walking jong-grom is a way to practise meditation while walking up and down. Cultivating this will bring happiness and serenity to our practice. When walking meditation, we should move unhurriedly, with a peaceful and relaxed attitude, and a smile on our face. Walking, we have all the time in the world and nothing else whatsoever that we have to do. With every step, we let our worries and concerns…

Remember to receive life as it is. This is the first step towards living in reality rather than in dreams which can easily turn into nightmares when we identify with them. If we don’t identify with the dreams, we can feel freedom in our hearts. Then we can go through both nightmares and pleasant dreams but not need to depend on any of them to be happy. Then we experience life as it is and let go o…

When I was about twelve, some of my mother’s extraordinary qualities became apparent to me in a very powerful way. I was a growing lad who had a cooked breakfast every morning before going off to school and would come back in the late afternoon and then eat cream doughnuts for tea and an hour later scarf down huge amounts of food at supper. I was turning into a burly youth. And every afternoon my…

Equanimity in Pali is called upekkha. It is characterized as that quality which brings about a sense of neutrality or an evenness of heart towards all beings. Its function is in maintaining a steadiness of mind and not allowing differences—whether physical, intellectual, spiritual, or whatever—to detract or influence our perception of those with whom we come in contact. Its proximate cause is unde…