This writing is taken from my previous blog, which I haven't written in since I started writing for this site. Most of these ideas stem from Alan Watts' talk entitled, "The Veil of Thoughts." It's been advertised to you. Wake up. The reason someone is asleep, in the terms of awareness …
Category: For Non Meditators
Be Soft, Go for the Matador
“Be soft with your practice. Think of method as a fine silvery stream, not a raging waterfall. It'll go meandering here, and trickling there. It'll find the grooves, the cracks, and the crevices. Just follow it, never let it out of your sight, and it will take you.” - Shen Yen If the bull went for …
Insects as Insects
“Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit …
Love Thyself
I do now, but for a while I didn't know how. What after all, am I? Who am I? I would go to the assistant teachers asking this. Is this me, this emotion, these thoughts? How can I give love to myself? Often superficial, during times when I wasn't fit to give metta to others, …
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 …
Remembering Goenka
I look at this picture and cannot help but smile. From it, the sensations I feel remind me of the warm feeling of love I had as a young boy looking at my grandfather. It makes me think of the time when everything was new and an adventure. I remember during this time recognising how …
Love Myself, Love My Family, Then Worry About Everything Else
Two hours a day seems like a huge investment until you consider why you're doing it. We, as a society, spend so much time trying to solve issues like gun control, violence, and environmental destruction when we haven't even solved the most simple and important questions that impact every moment of our daily life. First, …
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Proactive Healthcare
Meditation has made me more proactive about my heathcare. I'm used to living in a very reactive system where we only go to the doctor when we get sick, we only stop doing harmful things like drinking, smoking, and eating fast foods when they're literally killing us, and we only exercise as much as we need …
Compassion and Altruism
I'm on my psychiatry rotation in medical school, which is mostly concerned with identifying constellations of symptoms of severe mental illness in order to make a diagnosis and prescribe medication. Additionally, here and there, we apply snippets of psychodynamic theory in order to better understand our patients. "Psychodynamic" is the term we use to describe …
Living Vipassana 