Life’s difficulties don’t become fewer, but they don’t have to be a problem. There is a saying attributed to Lao Tzu which defines a great man as someone who encounters difficulties but never experiences them. Problems are problems when we’re trying to find an answer to them or when we’re trying to get away from them. Problems are problems as long as we have the idea that there shouldn’t be any. B…

Learning to settle the mind can be very difficult. It’s not always easy to find a way of stopping the mind from chasing things or to shake off a grudge or obsession. How can we calm down and feel a sense of balanced well-being in ourselves? Can we make the mind attend to itself and be fit for wise reflection and realization? Are we capable of contemplating what is happening to us, what our weaknes…

Sometimes a useful perception is seeing the pain as something receding from you. Think of yourself as sitting in the back of one of those old station wagons where the back seats face back. You’re sitting there watching the road recede away from you as you’re actually headed in the direction behind your back. So when a pain comes, it’s not that it’s actually coming at you. The pain is going, going,…

The sense world is unsatisfactory, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. When we attach to it, it takes us to despair because attachment means that we want it to be satisfactory; we want it to satisfy us, to make us content, happy and secure. But just notice the nature of happiness – how long can you stay happy? What is happiness? You may think it’s how you feel when you get what you want. Someo…

In the following exercises we use steady attention as a tool to investigate the nature and domain of the great heart. Any and all of these should begin with adjusting your centre of perception from the abstract brain sense to the heart sense. The brain sense holds experience in generalized learned categories, such as ‘Monday,’ ‘me,’ ‘the living room.’ The heart sense gets experience in direct, pre…

The difference between pain and suffering is the difference between freedom and bondage. If we cannot be with our pain, how can we hope to accept, investigate it, and heal? And if it’s not okay to grieve, be angry, feel frightened or lonely, how will we ever feel what we are feeling or hold it in our hearts and find our peace with it? When we run from life, we are further enslaved because where we…

One of the many wholesome qualities that the Buddha encourages us to develop, among the many different pieces of advice that is contained in the Tipitaka is the quality of gratitude, particularly gratitude to our parents. This is a very prominent theme in Asia and in the Pali tradition. Gratitude is Kataññu in Pali, and reciprocation is Katavedi. Katavedi is the response to generosity or kindness…

The whole reason for studying the Dhamma, the teachings of the Buddha, is to search for a way to transcend suffering and attain peace and happiness. Whether we study physical or mental phenomena, the mind (citta) or its psychological factors (cetasikas), it’s only when we make liberation from suffering our ultimate goal that we’re on the right path: nothing less. Suffering has a cause and conditio…

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…