“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 …
Category: Observations
On My Nani’s Passing
My nani (maternal grandmother) passed away around this time last week, i.e. Thursday, September 18th afternoon, however we did not take her off life-support until 24 hours after, which only gave the illusion of her still being there. It was a collective decision to wait until other family members arrived so that her last breath …
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 …
Going around the Sun and the sunny connections!
This is a special year and the day this post goes online, I celebrate my 40th birthday. I have so much going on as I reach this milestone of a year. It makes me quite humble at the thought of rounding the Sun forty times already 🙂 I am happy to realise that I am …
Continue reading Going around the Sun and the sunny connections!
Background Static
"Awareness and Equanimity are the only measurements along this path," repeated our Dhamma doot (translation: messenger, ambassador), aka S. N. Goenka. I remember hearing the words awareness and equanimity on the speakers every day, multiple times a day during long and short Vipassana meditation courses. Understanding it is still a work in progress. For the most part, …
Watching the show
I just wanted to be away. And I indeed was away for some time, away from pretty much everything and it was planned. It is important not to do anything sometime. Yes, you read it correctly and I was in that kinda phase - a very frugal existence, cut off from everything, waking up on the lap of nature with chirping birds, watching moments pass by, feeling your breath, and being aware about the 'you', enjoyed looking at colorful flowers and dancing peacocks and looking at the sky and how cloud skirted around the mountains....yes, there was mountain and there was water - a lake and there was peace. There is PEACE still and I love the feeling!
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, …
One Step
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 …
Attachment to Pain
When something deeply stirs me up in the realm of fear or pain, I outwardly express my internal emotions by smiling less or not at all, by feeling and being impatient with myself and others, by staying to the point in communication and speaking in monotone so much so that it may easily be perceived …
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 …
Living Vipassana 