Latest
How is your meditation going?
Meditation is the way to access our own pure potential for mental freedom and happiness, gain deep experience of Buddha’s teachings, and really change for the better. My tradition, the New Kadampa Tradition, is a meditator’s tradition – every sentence we hear in the teachings is intended to be an object of meditation, to be […]
Mother’s Day 2013
To celebrate all kind mothers everywhere on Mother’s Day (USA), including you, since a bunch of flowers is a bit hard to pull off, Kadampa Life offers you instead a double billing. Two fabulous guest articles, one on the Buddhist meditation of seeing everyone as our mother and the other a story of a mother’s […]
Who ARE we?!
Have you ever wondered this …?! Well, who are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?) I really wanna know (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?) It is a good thing to figure out as our sense of self dominates our entire life and everything we do. We are, by and large, who […]
Losing Andromeda
Here is a timely story from Eileen, aged 91, which illustrates the last article on Kadampa Life… Buddha said that our current uncontrolled lives, which he called “samsara”, are in the nature of suffering. He described seven types of suffering: birth, ageing, sickness, death, having to put […]
What’s YOUR problem?! :-)
A recent survey discovered that people in the UK “feel fully fit and well only 61 days of the year”. Some Australian commentators apparently reacted to this report as typical of the “whinging Poms”, but the fact is that other studies show that this level of health worry is just about normal throughout the Western […]
More to read…
Choose Freedom
It may sound counterintuitive, but a free mind is a controlled mind. Having no control over our own mind is the same as having no choice in our thoughts. If we cannot choose what to think at any given moment, we automatically default to our habits and react with thoughts that we don’t even like […]
How meditation overcomes negative thoughts and emotions
A bit more on the subject of delusions and how to get rid of them. Nothing is as it seems If it is true that “The things we normally perceive do not exist” it means that nothing is really out there, and everything is free of being real and fixed. This means we can change […]
Awakening our inner Santa
This is continued from this article for the holiday season. So, what’s wrong with miserliness. Well, for starters: Due to miserliness we sometimes wish to hold onto our possessions forever, but since this is impossible we experience much suffering. If our possessions dwindle, or we are forced to give them away, we experience great pain. […]
Oh woe is me! How to stop distracting ourselves from happiness.
Probably, as mentioned in this previous article, the worst fault of self-cherishing is how it undermines our wish and capability to love and help others. I have a couple of embarrassing examples of this from just now, which I have summoned up the courage to share with you below … As my teacher says in […]
First you, then me ~ the Bodhisattva’s attitude
I hope you’re having a happy holiday season. Just before Christmas I wrote a couple of articles about becoming more generous, and I have a few more things to say on the subject. We’ve no doubt bought and given all our presents by now, but we don’t have to wait a whole ‘nother year before […]
Surfing life’s waves
The other day I saw a little dude with his surfboard looking disappointedly at the ocean – it was clearly his first day of vacation and his parents perhaps hadn’t warned him that the Gulf of Mexico is not known for its waves. Lojong or mind-training practitioners are also a little disappointed when everything goes […]
Awakening the Santa within
This is continued from this article for the holiday season. So, what’s wrong with miserliness. Well, for starters: Due to miserliness we sometimes wish to hold onto our possessions forever, but since this is impossible we experience much suffering. If our possessions dwindle, or we are forced to give them away, we experience great pain. […]
Can ageing be worthwhile?
Carrying on from where this article left off. The power of the Bodhisattva’s mind When a Bodhisattva experiences pain, they regard this pain as an example of the pain experienced by countless other living beings. They do not possess the pain or identify with it. Ordinarily, pain destroys our happiness because we grasp it tightly […]
Rioting on the streets of England and in our own minds
What do you make of all these riots sweeping across England right now? People are getting hurt. They are reminding me of two things: (1) The uncontrollable nature of anger (2) How influenced we are by others In the newspaper I was reading online, a commentator tries to figure out what exact grievances are leading […]
