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…

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…