We are on holiday on the Outer Hebrides island of Harris. Now the admission. It has many small studios where local painters and potters display their work but I usually avoid going into them because I’m very picky and I find it impossible to say something appreciative if in fact I don’t feel it. I experience it as condescending and embarrassing. So you get the picture. Now yesterday, as we paused to look at the map, Philippa popped out of the car to look at a gallery by the s

Last night our small Sangha investigated the experience of having a belief on the level of the felt sense. Interesting! This is quite a difficult thing to get hold of and I was not sure how it would go. It needed a clear distinction between the belief itself and the experience of holding it. What most of us found was that the felt sense varied with the belief: sometimes pleasant, sometimes affirming, sometimes not. These responses were still very much dependent upon the conte

Our small Sangha continues to talk about how our perception is coloured by our previous experiences and the problems this causes. This remains interesting for me because it brings together psychotherapy and the Dharma - which of course is my ‘thing’. How the patterns of our earliest hurts are a big part of what Buddhism calls our obscurations - things that make us unaware of how things really are when we are not distorting them. And I realise that this is a big one - who real

The last couple of pieces I’ve sent out on rebirth and the places we may end up reborn - I think - deserve a bit more time because they are full of interesting ideas and also lots of practical help. So here goes: Last night I was thinking about the Twelve Links that I listed in the piece on rebirth. I thought how difficult they are to read and how easily I get bored just a few in and begin to skip towards the end. Is this just me? It’s a pity because the basic observation is

Paul Williams, Emeritus Professor of Indian and Tibetan Philosophy at Bristol University, shocked everyone when he converted to Catholicism. He was distressed by the Buddhist understanding of death because it meant he would be separated from his beloved wife once he died for ever. No coming back together in their next lives or finding each other in heaven. I tell this story because while Buddhism does believe that we are reborn innumerable times, driven by the compulsion of

Last night our Jungian friend said something that really caught my attention - actually amazed me. She said that sometimes she goes back to a memory and carefully goes through all the details so that she has a feeling of every part of it. Not as a way to explore something difficult but as somethings pleasurable - or that’s how I understood her. Now that picks up something I have been thinking about since writing the last piece on Me, Me, Me that explores the nature of our p

A very old friend in both senses of the phrase recently sent me an article he had written about his time living with the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche in his home in the small Italian city of Formia. This brought back many memories for me because I too had lived in this flat for a short time after Norbu Rinpoche invited me to join him and his community right at the beginning of the 1980’s. The article contained several photos - there was the sofa I had slep

In these dark times it’s perhaps no surprise that our Sangha last night found themselves discussing the dark side of our human nature. This was started by the grim observation that when forced into a corner by something threatening our survival we would in all probability drop our bodhisattva ideals and become violent. Rats in a trap. The person who offered this insight was not happy about it but it just seemed that the evidence of our history pointed in this direction. I ch

Last night our small Sangha talked about Essence Love again - it’s strange in a way that this apparently simple idea should be the cause of so much confusion. Several things struck me about everyone’s contributions - the preponderance of the idea that it is related to and influenced by a babies good or bad attachment to her or his mother, and the opposite, that it has no biological base, that it somehow sits at a lower or deeper level and is not affected or disturbed by conf

One of the disadvantages of writing blogs for our small Sangha each week is that I have had to leave behind for the moment pieces on what is happening in our wider world. I’m one of those people who have decided that continually listening to the news is personally destructive - and perhaps because of this I have become a little insulated from the impact of the daily spiral of horror. Well, that’s what I thought …. Over the last couple of days I have been a little unwell, no

Sometimes it’s good to pause and take stock. Our small Sangha has just spent some weeks exploring what it means to be a bodhisattva. And admittedly it can all get a bit complicated - the balance between wisdom and compassion, the difference between compassion and empathy, exchanging our own wellbeing for someone else’s pain, practicing loving-kindness, giving and taking the victory and so on. Then on top of all this we have also been observing our own reactions to these pract

I don’t know about you but I have found Giving The Victory an extremely difficult practice. If fact I have more or less completely failed at it. The thing is, while I can let the other person have the last word, inside, I still think they are wrong and furthermore feel I have now taken the moral high ground. And then when it comes to imagining giving the victory to a rightwing politician, like Nigel Farage, I can’t even fake it. This has caused quite a lot of conversation be

Yesterday evening our Sangha joined others from all over the world in a practice of Loving Kindness lead by the Theravada Monks who have now completed their 108 day walk for peace across America. Just the thought of so much goodness at this time of fear and confusion makes my heart open. It was also very well timed since we have spent the last few weeks focusing on this practice and this leads me to speculate what a non-dual version of it might look like - but it is only a s

I woke up this morning with the phrase, “I can’t be someone different”. It’s strange when this happens. Something that I’ve heard many times, something I’ve kind of accepted without thinking about it, suddenly comes into focus and I think is that true? The phrase in this context is being used in reaction to another person asking could we do, or not do, go, act, or say something differently. Basically challenging how we are or our decision. How we think and feel about things.

Our small Sangha explored the practice of Loving Kindness last week. As well as simply practicing it we also tried to observe what happened inside us when we did so. The idea was simple. None of us just ‘do’ a meditation practice. We always bring to it who we are. All our hopes and fears, good intentions, typical distractions, various motivations, odd beliefs and conflicted emotions are also present. How could they not be - this is the stuff that makes ‘me’ up and it is me w

May I be safe, happy, healthy, and live in ease. May all beings be safe, happy, healthy, and live in ease. Our second bodhisattva practice is loving kindness. Metta in Pali, Maitri in Sanskrit - a word that could just as easily be translated as ‘unconditional friendliness’. You probably are already familiar with this practice of extending loving kindness to oneself and others, and Paul Gilbert through his Compassionate Mind, has helped it become very popular as an extensi

Our small Sangha, yesterday evening, explored ‘Sending and Receiving’, the bodhisattva practice of Tonglen , in which we receive the pain and suffering of others and send out healing and wellbeing. As expected our reactions were quite varied. Some gaining a real insight from finding it unpleasant, annoying or challenging while others experienced its deep kindness for a world full of people who suffer in just the same way as we ourselves do. I also had a further insight. When

So let’s look at several meditations that are specifically linked to our aspiration to become a bodhisattva. The first is called ‘Sending and Receiving’, or in Tibetan Tonglen . It’s rooted in the Shantideva’s Way of the Bodhisattva and is also found in the Thirty Seven Practices of the Bodhisattva I mentioned previously, and it is designed to cultivate loving kindness and compassion, make ourselves less special and at the same time hopefully help others as well. This is

We have an Irish friend who whenever she talks about the Dharma always says, “It’s all about training”. And she’s right. This last piece on the Perfections, before we go on to explore some bodhisattva meditations, is all about what training in the Perfections could look like and some of the things we might find coming up in ourselves when doing so. But first another idea which is called the ‘two accumulations of merit and wisdom’. This one is important because it contains

I can’t quite leave this alone. I realised after writing about emptiness in the section on meditation and wisdom that I had entirely excluded anything personal and also about the experience of it. All the juicy stuff that makes a concept, particularly a very abstract concept, real. So here is the corrective … I think I avoided the notion of emptiness for about thirty years. I knew it was at the core of the Dharma but it seemed too thinky, too overly complicated to get into.