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 …
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? …
I am still a Whiner
"Oh my God, you're such a whiner!", said my girlfriend smilingly to me. I replied back with a mix of whining and knowing, "Yes, and now you see why meditation is so necessary for me!" Not that she doubted the positive effects of meditation, after all she meditates herself, but in that moment praising meditation seemed …
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 …
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Glory to the Sun
written by Elena Olejarz from Toronto, Canada Perhaps the title of this post contrasts with the real precepts of the Dhamma way. After all, we don’t want to spend too much resting time in a tall, fluffy, cozy bed during a ten day sit. Neither would we want to sit too comfortably so as to …
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 …
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Living Vipassana 