I think that as long as we do our best in each moment we are on the path of Dhamma. That doesn't have to be direct meditation. It has to simply do with being good to ourselves and anyone else. Everyone has the potential for that, just like we can all become Buddha. We all …
Author: Anonymous
The Interior Castle or Why We Meditate?
An intelligent person is always available to hesitation. The more intelligent you are, the more easily you become available to hesitations; because each hesitation is a new beginning, a new search, a new inquiry. (Osho, Talks on Kabir) I was staring at the small book in Buddhist library in Kopan: it was the book I …
A Serious Game
Next to me my brother and a few friends are sitting down to play Super Smash Brothers Melee. It's an old fighting game for Gamecube that has recently become more popular. If you haven't played it, it combines all the great Nintendo characters into a single platform level where you have to knock each other …
Sitting Outside, Looking In
I sit on the patio chairs with a smoothie outside Nature's Fare. Across the parking lot way I see two young girls in a car. Their dad left just a moment ago to go into Nature's Fare. I sit and watch the girls. The younger one in the backseat begins to cry. Why? The heat? …
Can we break our habits? Or: Why we suffer.
I came to my first Vipassana session at the beginning of 2012 after a short experience with relaxation techniques and psychotherapy; so those first encounters were framed with a beginning attempt to seek therapeutic relief for myself. By now I did six 10-day meditation courses and each course was quite different. Each sitting brought some …
Continue reading Can we break our habits? Or: Why we suffer.
Keep Talking
Lately I've been more aware of when I speak, why I speak and how I speak. Communication is such a valuable tool, yet to discuss meditation and direct experience is sometimes so difficult. We essentially read left to right. When you see the saying, “I love you,” you don't know what is being loved until the word …
On Labels, Lightly Worn: It’s Okay to Flinch
"You were the only one that flinched," she says. I'm unsure if my friend's trying to comfort or criticize, but I appreciate this information. I couldn't have otherwise known how, or if, the room reacted to my confession, not with my eyes clamped shut and head tucked down as though somebody's response might include thrown …
Continue reading On Labels, Lightly Worn: It’s Okay to Flinch
The Art of Perception
What is beauty? Does it need to be expressed? When I meditate, I'm not expressing anything and that makes it my biggest expression. Not because I'm outwardly expressing anything, but because I'm feeling all these expressions inwardly. In stillness, all the movement moves freely. Nature is changing and it doesn't need our two bits to …
The Words…
I was thinking about the power of words, and I wanted to start today with Mr. Cohen verses: Do Not Be a Magician - Be Magic. Leonard is certainly a master with the words but then I realized that the words we use can be both - magic or evil. There are many words we …
Don’t Waste Your Sorry’s
There's a story I heard about the first time Goenka visited the Dhamma Surabhi (The Vipassana centre in Merritt, B.C.) Everyone was getting ready for the first meditation with Goenkaji, which I imagine would be exciting, or tiring, considering his energy is so high that I would probably pass out meditating next to him. Right …
Living Vipassana 