I have been listening to a few of Bhikkhu Bodhi’s talks on mettā, loving-kindness. He explained that in many practice situations, mettā can often be used with an external, outgoing energy and making a genuine wish for other people to be happy. However, there is also an internal response that can occur for us when we express mettā in this way. I was surprised when Bhikkhu Bodhi mentioned that th…

I was reading something from a talk of Ajahn Sumedho that touched me very much. He was saying that when he’d just become a monk, he didn’t speak Thai at all and he met a Thai monk who had previously been in the Thai Navy; so, he’d met Americans and knew a bit of English. This Thai monk had been with Ajahn Chah for a while, so he was quite diligent in terms of discipline and meditation. Ajahn Sumed…

Greater in battle than the man who would conquer a thousand-thousand men, is he who would conquer just one– himself. Better to conquer yourself than others. When you’ve trained yourself, living in constant self-control, neither a deva nor gandhabba, nor a Mara banded with Brahmas, could turn that triumph back into defeat. This reflection from the Pāli Canon is from Thousands, Dhammapada Chapter 8…

It is important to recognize that the nature of becoming is generated through the force of desire, tanha, of craving—craving for sensuality, craving for being—for a sense of self, to be somebody, to be something, or craving for non- being—that sense of pushing away, of aversion, of negation. The becoming mind then seeks an object that is either internal or external. What does that seeking look lik…

“Being freed from all sense desires” is a radical relinquishing of attachment. For loving-kindness to manifest fully and come to fruition, we need to undermine the fundamental roots of attachment, defilement, and clinging. So this takes mettā practice and ramps it up to another level, bringing it to a liberating insight practice. As we cultivate loving-kindness, the heart becomes more attuned to…

There was a layman who used to come and see Ajahn Chah who had a lot of complaints: his fields weren’t producing very much and his buffalo was getting old and his house wasn’t big enough and his kids weren’t satisfying him and… He said he was getting really sick of the world and becoming dispassionate. Ajahn Chah said, “No, you’re not. You’re not dispassionate. If you got more buffaloes, newer one…

In Dhamma practice, wisdom acts as the direct antidote to ignorance by examining the reality of life and the world with a stable, stilled and unbiased mind sustained in the present. The direct antidote to craving is the systematic and integrated development of wholesome mental states. In the case of love, the most prominent of these virtues are lovingkindness and the effort to be a good friend. Tr…

Ajaan Suwat was once asked why Buddhism didn’t have a god. If only Buddhism had a god, the person said, it would give people a sense of reassurance that there was somebody out there looking out for them when they couldn’t quite make it on their own. Ajaan Suwat’s response was, “If there were some god who could ordain that, if when I took a mouthful of food, everybody in the world would get full, I…

The symbols we accumulate to structure the world around us are bound up with the faculty of memory. Memory is a database of all our previous experiences that runs like a continuous thread through the pattern of our mental activity. The data from memory comes in through the five senses; it’s the senses that tell us what to remember. An enormous amount of our thinking is based on memory. When we see…

Cultivating the brahmaviharas means bringing these qualities (metta, karuna, mudita, and upekkha) into consciousness. It is like exercising muscles that have not been used. As you develop these qualities, you have to consider whether your mind is getting clearer or more confused. The correct practice of the brahmaviharas always leads to increased clarity and joy. That is the nature of these qualit…