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

The second of the Three Jewels of refuge is the Dharma. The Dharma is the Buddhist teachings generally but when we say the Buddha - or...

Last week we looked at our relationship to refuge in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. This week let’s begin a little journey where we look...

After we have taken refuge we then recite the aspiration of the bodhisattva …. “May I be a guard for those who need protection … etc.”....

This blog is also the material we are going to look at next in our Wednesday group. I’m sure I must have written about refuge before...

The response to the last 'do nothing' blog has been very positive so here is an article by Nina Wise, an American performance artist who...