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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…
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 […]
How to avoid stress and burn-out at work
This is related to the article, Meditation in the Pursuit of Happiness. Do you or any of your friends have any of the following symptoms of chronic stress or burn-out? Do you have to drag yourself to work and, when you get home, do you have no energy left to do much other than flop […]
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). […]
Watching out for the Scrooge within
The holiday season is upon us, and it seems as good a time as any to think about miserliness and generosity. Ebenezer Scrooge: What reason have you got to be merry? You’re poor enough. Fred: What reason have you got to be miserable? You’re rich enough. Ebenezer Scrooge: There is no such thing as rich […]
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 […]
What is the root of all evil according to Buddha?!
Synopsis Buddha said that the root of all our negative minds — all our so-called “delusions” or unpeaceful, uncontrolled minds — is self-grasping ignorance. We are grasping very tightly at an exaggerated sense of self — an I or me that is independent, real. Due to this we naturally develop a grossly overrated, over the […]
Must we all suffer?
The last article, What is the root of all evil according to Buddha?, looked at how self-grasping — thinking that our I or me is real, solid, independent — naturally leads to self-cherishing, which believes that same I or me to be the most important. Self-cherishing thinks that holding onto ourselves and other things, finding […]
Why can’t I be happy?! Buddha’s reply.
We all want to be happy, isn’t that the truth?! In fact, we all want to be happy all the time; it’s the way living beings are wired. But are we happy all the time? And if not, given our wish and the 24/7 effort we put into it, why not? Buddha Shakyamuni and many […]
It all depends how we’re looking at it
So I have recently moved from Florida (80 degrees, wall to wall sunshine, sea breezes, pelicans and dolphins) to Liverpool (frozen lake, not quite wall to wall sunshine, bracing wind, swans and Lambananas.) Just now I was scooting down the stairs to the World Peace Café that is conveniently placed inside the large house I’m […]
