Curious to try hermetic life, in 1999, I stepped outside the monastic cloister. The following years without the support of the sorority were a test of my refuge, compelling me to rely on the qualities of compassion and forgiveness as never before. Still bound by monastic precepts, living on my own stirred feelings of anxiety and insecurity. From day to day, I did not know how my needs would be pro…

In changing what we do, we change who we are. The Buddha strongly emphasized the importance of recollecting our generosity and our virtue. It may not be something we are accustomed to, but if we don’t notice the good that we’re doing and appreciate it, our old, limiting patterns will take over. We might be afraid that we’ll get conceited if we allow ourselves to really feel the joy of the good tha…

If you’re the sort of person who’s open and honest, you’ll find your window for disbanding suffering and defilement right where you’re honest with yourself, right where you come to your senses. You don’t have to go explaining high level Dhamma to anyone. All you need is the ordinary level of being honest with yourself about the sufferings and drawbacks of your actions, so that you can put a stop t…

One of the things that I realised is important in my own practice is to support this sense of faith - faith that it is a practice worth doing, that it brings good results, and that I too have the capacity to practise and achieve these results. In the teaching on Dependent Origination, one of the links is that faith arises out of suffering. This might sound a little strange but, in a sense, it’s ob…

As our practice unfolds, there are definitely going to be challenging times. Unconscious material is becoming conscious, and we are gradually opening up to a larger mind and a larger world. Old strategies break apart and fall away, and new qualities emerge and go through various stages of growing pains. If we are truly committed to transforming old, challenging patterns, we will need support. When…

Sometimes it surprises me how many of us seem to be working with death, dying, or endings in a more general sense. It is amazing how much these endings are part of what we experience. As we are all human beings, death is part of our lives, in terms of both our own death and the deaths of everyone else around us. What I see is that many of us are working with the grief that arises from losing someb…

Can we imagine ourselves not wanting anything? Living in a place of desirelessness? Maybe we are afraid that it would be like being dead. Yet that is what the practice is actually leading us to. We learn to be held by life, to let life guide us, rather than being guided by desires. We learn to let trust guide us, to let faith guide us, to let peace of mind guide us. That is a different refuge. Our…

In the practice of Buddhism, you must find your own path. It is up to you to search for and discover the way to transcend suffering. The correct way to search is to look inside yourself. The path lies within the hearts and minds of each of us. So be tough and remain diligent until you reach the final destination. This reflection by Mae Chee Kaew is from the book, Mae Chee Kaew, (pdf) p. 242, compi…

“There are these five ways of subduing hatred by which, when hatred arises in a monk, he should wipe it out completely. Which five? “When you give birth to hatred for an individual, you should develop goodwill for that individual. Thus the hatred for that individual should be subdued. “When you give birth to hatred for an individual, you should develop compassion for that individual. Thus the hatr…

All too often we think that getting in touch with our emotions is a means of tapping into who we really are—that we’ve been divorced from our true nature and that by getting back in touch with our emotions we’ll reconnect with our true identity. But your emotions are not your true nature; they’re just as fabricated as anything else. Because they’re fabricated, the real issue is to learn how to fab…