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.

This is a vast subject so all I want to do in this blog is pick out some key pieces of information so that if anyone was to ask you, ‘What sort of Buddhist meditation do you do and why do you do it?’, you could answer easily and with confidence. Calm and Insight All Buddhist meditations contain within them methods that achieve a calm state of mind, shamatha , that then enables insight, vipashyana , into how things really are - reality once our obscuring ‘beautiful monsters’ h

I’m realising how I tend to concretise ‘things’, for example my ‘self’; and how freeing it is to see ‘thing s’ , including, my ‘self’, as processes. This really clicked with me when reading Loch Kelly where he explained ego-identification as a ‘selfing process’ 1 . For a long time, I’ve been pondering how easily I turn processes into ‘entities’ (things); a process I’ve nicknamed ‘entitifying’. A particular area where I continue to do this is when I'm practicing a ‘doing not

The next two Perfections are patience and diligence. I think of the first two, generosity and ethics, as largely facing outwards as they influence our relationship with others. These two on the other hand I feel are a bit more about how we are in ourselves. How we handle emotions and motivate ourselves. Patience As with all terms translated from Sanskrit or Tibetan there is no perfect match. Along with patience, forbearance or endurance are sometimes used. However, for me th

In the last piece we took an overview of the six or ten Perfections. Now let’s go through them two at a time because tucked away within all this seeming goodness are a few tasty complications that are worth contemplating. I think we could say the first two are about ourselves and how we are with others. Generosity I’ve talked about generosity before and just how tricky it is in itself and how our ability to be generous ebbs and wains depending upon whether we feel in an open

One of our dearest friends said last night, when we were talking about Buddhist ‘ideas, that they were all made up. This got me thinking and on reflection I believe she’s right. Every idea about spirituality, psychology and just about everything else,  is  just made up - what else could it be since they all emanate from within the human mind? All acts of human creativity that seek to understand the unfathomable mysteries of being alive. However, I wonder if there is also a h

How do I reconcile having an ideal and my actual experience of putting it - or not putting it - into practice? This piece on being a bodhisattva looks at qualities that a would-be bodhisattva cultivates on the path while continuing with the theme of just how hard this is and how we can make it real. We begin with the qualities to be cultivated, these are the Six Perfections: generosity (giving), morality (ethical conduct), patience (forbearance), energy (diligent effort), m

Last night I learnt from our sangha that there was established scientific research into the difference between empathy and compassion and that at least one Buddhist group had picked this up and was talking about it. This followed on the heels of my writing about what to do when we become overwhelmed by the horrors and cruelty of this world and how this is remedied by balancing compassion with wisdom - the Buddhist solution. Looking at this material I learnt that empathy is a

Have you stopped looking at the daily news? I have. I just can’t bear it. The relentless cruelty and suffering. The fear and utter stupidity that causes it. And yet at the same time I know I'm trying to embrace the aspiration of a bodhisattva - but how can I be when, out of my own fear, I hide my head in the sand? This brings us to the second of these blogs on being a bodhisattva. How do we manage to really feel the unhappiness and suffering of others in such a way that it d

This is the third piece on Taking Refuge in the Three Jewels - I take refuge in the sangha. Or in our way of saying it, I take refuge in those that rest in the awakened mind. The strange thing is, despite being involved with several Buddhist sanghas throughout my life, writing this has been hard. The easy bit is the standard definition. The word sangha means community or assembly. Originally it simply meant the assembly of Buddhist monks and nuns who were in a reciprocal rel