[From a Morning Reflection, September 2013] There is a fairly well-known sutta where the Buddha indicates that one who contemplates death about every few seconds develops mindfulness of death heedfully, with diligence, while one who contemplates death every few minutes or more develops mindfulness of death heedlessly, with sluggishness (AN 8.73). It only takes two or three seconds for someone to d…

We can easily be carried away by the desire to perfect tools or means for practice. It’s almost as if we’re focusing so much on the hammer that we’ve forgotten the piece of wood we’re working on. We focus on all the tools in the workshop, and we forget the piece of furniture we’re making. Not exactly the best analogy, perhaps a bit masculine for a nun, but sometimes I think of my mind as a worksho…

We need to train and develop when we practise. Any aspect of the practice relies on this training. It relies on doing things over and over. There are certain qualities in the life of an anagarika, one who isn’t bound to a home, that the Buddha called treasures. They are valuable goods. You probably know some of them. One of them has to do with our body – it is what the Buddha called kayasamvara, r…

You have a valuable treasure within you—the treasure of being a human being. So you have to look after this treasure until it grows more complete, until it becomes the treasure of the heavenly realms, the treasure of nibbāna. Look after this treasure. It’s hard to look after if you don’t know how to use it, if you don’t know how to take care of it. If you’re not discerning, this treasure can turn…

The Buddha said there are three points to check before we do something: ‘This is for my welfare’, ‘This for the welfare of others’ and ‘It leads to nibbāna, [Majjhima Nikāya 19]’, which means it leads to letting go, to release, to non-compulsiveness; it leads to the mind’s becoming less feverish or gripped and finally towards peace, towards ceasing of this inner compulsiveness – however you want…

The Middle Way is much misunderstood in the West. People think it means the easy and convenient way of practice. But that idea of the path is merely the way of the kilesas; the way of mental defilements like laziness and complacency. Effort is difficult because it goes directly against the pull of the kilesas. There is an innate desire to just relax or to go into some pursuit that you feel comfort…

Lost Something? If you understand that good and bad, right and wrong, all lie within you, then you won’t have to go looking for them somewhere else. Just look for them where they arise. If you don’t, it’d be like losing something in one place and then going to look for it in another. If you lose something here, you must look for it here. Even if you don’t find it at first, keep looking where you d…

There’s also the issue of the effort you put into that happiness. Is it worth it? Do you really get the happiness you want from it? What’s the cost of this happiness you’re pursuing? You want to look at this balance sheet very carefully. One of the reasons we practice concentration is to gain a sense of the range of happiness, the range of well-being that the mind is capable of. For a lot of peopl…

Sometimes, our practice gets bogged down when we forget to enjoy and make it interesting. We do the practice by applying a method, taking a methodological approach: “If I just follow the technique, I’m going to get peaceful somehow.” Actually, practice relies on the quality of awareness. The results we experience depend on the quality of our awareness and mindfulness: calming the bodily formation,…

Life is not easy for those who have a sense of shame, who are modest, pure-minded and detached, morally upright and reflective. v. 245 If we find ourselves thinking, ‘This is just too much, I can’t let go of this one’, we need to be extra careful. It is easy to let go of minor attachments, but the really serious ones are a different story. The Buddha knew about that differesnt story, the one we te…