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