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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…
It could be us
Tributes are pouring in for Elizabeth Edwards, who died at 10.15am yesterday. As one cancer survivor says: “It breaks our hearts, because it could be us,” Schmid said. “She lived through everyone’s worst nightmare — the loss of a child, cancer, infidelity.” She did. Imagine how hard it must be, for example, to face leaving […]
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 […]
Don’t worry, be happy
Sarah, the piano, and the Italian vacation We can get in the habit of worrying about small things incessantly if we are not careful. Of course, our worries never feel small because they fill our mind. There is no objective scale. I was in England this summer visiting my family. We spent a delightful weekend […]
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. […]
Putting things in perspective
We make up our own storyline as we go along. So we might as well make it a good one. I just heard that our two $700 bicycles that I ride all the time have been stolen. The upstairs tenants left them unlocked in the front yard. (I’m property manager but away at the moment). […]
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 […]
Letting go before we are swamped
One of my dearest friends is a hoarder. He is gentle, kind, thoughtful, funny, and very unable to let go of his junk. For him, of course, that is because it is not junk. We tried to do a yard sale of all his stuff earlier this year and after weeks of work involving a […]
Love, attachment and desire according to Buddhism
Happy Valentine’s Day! A good day to talk about love, I think. This is the annual “love day”. For most of us, our love is a mixture of two things – attachment, which is not in fact love at all, and love, which is. I like Valentine’s Day here in America. In England, Valentine’s Day […]
Five ways to deal with criticism, part 2
This continues on from Five ways to deal with criticism. How to deal with criticism and overcome our faults without feeling guilty or inadequate If we have any self-cherishing, criticism will probably sting us to a greater or lesser extent. As Christopher Penny put it: “It depends on how high my self-cherishing dial is turned […]
