Before the monastery was established, I can remember Ajahn Amaro telling me that there was a Thai monk in Fremont, Ajahn Maha Prasert, who was keen to see a forest monastery succeed in the Bay Area. Since the founding of the monastery, Ajahn Maha Prasert’s support has been unfailing. Generally in Thailand at the beginning of the Rains Retreat or a bit earlier than that, most of the monks in monast…

Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there’s anything lying behind them. This mode is called emptiness because it’s empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories…

You asked why it was that you cannot explain Dhamma to other people. That ability is probably a matter of innate tendencies (most likely based on kamma), and I doubt whether you can do much about it. We read that Acharn Mun was superb at giving talks and explanations of Dhamma, but Acharn Sao (his teacher) would speak only a couple of sentences and go silent; and this despite the fact that he was…

“Protecting oneself, one protects others; protecting others, one protects oneself. And how does one, in protecting oneself, protect others? By the repeated and frequent practice of meditation. And how does one, in protecting others, protect oneself? By patience and forbearance, by a non-violent and harmless life, by loving-kindness and compassion. ‘I shall protect myself’, in that way the Attendin…

In Buddhism, what we call ‘mind’ (or ‘citta’) does not refer just to thinking and the brain. The mind has a much broader dimension. It includes thinking, but it also includes our perceptions, feelings, stories and memories. For example, when I perceive something, I already have an imprint in me, a memory that can help me recognize: ‘this is this; that is that.’ As we become more conscious of the w…

In the classical Buddhist teachings, there are four gradations or stages of enlightenment that are described over and over again. The first level is called ‘stream-entry’. This represents an irreversible breakthrough into a quality of psychological integration or self-actualization or ‘emotional intelligence’ that will necessarily result, eventually, in the ‘unshakeable well-being’ of full enlight…

If we are focused in samādhi with continuous mindfulness, then sometimes the state known as pīti will arise. Pīti is characterised by physical sensations of coolness or of a rapturous energy thrilling throughout the body – like waves breaking on the shore – which can cause the body to sway and the hair to stand on end. These sensations are accompanied by mental perceptions of physical expansive…

Every winter at our monasteries two or three months are set aside as quiet retreat time – a time to focus more intensively on our inner work. The encouragement given during this time is towards cultivating a stiller, quieter space within the heart. For it is only through attention to this that we are able to observe all our skilful and less skilful habits, and to train the mind – making it into a…

The painful flaw of self-view is that it makes how I feel, and what passes through awareness, into who I am. So, as what comes up in awareness is often a mix of unresolved memories and impressions, this habit of identification gives rise to a hurt or flawed self who keeps rehashing old grudges and disappointments and regrets in an attempt to clear them. This self fixates on the details of ‘she sai…

The agenda of ‘self’ and the agenda of enlightenment are very different. As we develop our meditation and interest in the Dhamma, we keep bumping into the resistances of self. It would be nice to be enlightened and free, and as meditators and dhamma practitioners we put a lot of energy into this. But at the same time we can feel bewildered because there is also a lot of resistance, a lot of forget…