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, …
Category: Personal Experiences
Listening with Empathy
Apparently we all like to talk about ourselves. I don't know why it took me 60+ days (not consecutive!) of being quiet to become aware of this. Yesterday I met with a friend after years. She is surfing through some serious vicissitudes right now. As our evening progressed, I realized my frustration with not getting …
Is Balance Bogus?
My five-year-old nephew begs me to pick him up over and over again and spin circles till we fall over, dizzy and laughing. His delight, I think, is rooted in the same reason I used to roll down hillsides and rock my canoe so fiercely it’d flip. As kids, we playfully seek a loss of …
Results Don’t Matter
We have very little control over the results of our actions. The physical products of our choices depend on a large group of people and how they respond to each other. For example, if I build beautiful sculpture, it's possible that someone will dislike it and destroy it, or maybe someone will transport it to …
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 …
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 …
Right Action
Can I only be successful by keeping busy? Sometimes I feel like we perceive the people who do the most or produce the most as the most successful people. For example, if I'm in charge of running a factory and I figure out how to produce twice as many goods for no additional cost, 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 …
Let Them Be
Meditating / Sitting in silence, quiet and alert, observing the self without reacting brings forth many awarenesses. With continuous practice, this awareness grows, comes alive and stays alive in the undercurrents, ever-present even off-the-cushion. Which is exactly the point of daily meditation. I think it is accurate to say that at one point in time, I …
Complete Self Love
Compliments feel good, and insults hurt. On a subtler level, compliments improve our self confidence and insults weaken it. Even more subtly, we may start to choose our actions by guessing what others would compliment us for doing. Upon further reflection, I discover that a large percentage of my actions are dictated by what other people will …
Living Vipassana 