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Dealing with negative thoughts and emotions
Delusions distort our world. With delusions, we project something from the side of our mind, and then we feel that the person or thing actually is like that from their own side, having nothing to do with our perceiving consciousness. All delusions do this, such as anger, which came up in this first article on [...]
Handling change
Quantum mechanics and laws of physics alone show that nothing stays the same, from the smallest to the biggest thing. Subatomic particles are whizzing about in your body and even the seemingly solid walls around you. The blood never stops rushing through your veins. The earth never stops journeying. Our galaxy is flying away from [...]
Does compassion make us happy or sad?
Compassion is the fuel of spiritual progress, but is it a sad or a happy state of mind? The Buddhist scriptures all say it is a peaceful, happy mind, but how does it feel in our own experience? How is it even possible to be happy or calm when caring about the horrible suffering of [...]
More to read…
Advice from a Buddhist dad on making practice a priority
This is the second guest article from our Kadampa Buddhist dad, who has five young kids and a very busy job. The first is Kadampa Parenting. Making our daily practice a priority In many ways, the biggest obstacle to our attainment of enlightenment is our inability to establish a consistent daily practice. This is especially [...]
Disney’s movie Chimpanzee ~ “There is meaning in those eyes.”
I watched the movie Chimpanzee last night with my friends Anya and her two great kids, Zia (12) and Tom Tom (10). We wanted to see it before May 3rd as Disneynature are donating some of the profits this week to the Jane Goodall Institute. (Spoiler alert: I knew the plot before I watched the movie [...]
Anger wrecks our day(s)
The smallest thing can fill our mind if we have no control over our thoughts. Someone on Facebook fessed up that they had been engaging in an “internal tantrum and imaginary arguments”, and I thought to myself, “Now ain’t that the way our delusions go!” It is so easy to get irritated if we let [...]
Mind-training and social work
This is the second article from a guest writer, Kadampa Buddhist and student social worker. For the first, see Meditation helps me be a better social worker and vice versa and for the second, see Where is a problem? Throughout my three years of training to become a social worker I have undertaken three long-term [...]
Mirror, mirror, at the door
At 8am this morning, as I was peacefully absorbed in meditation, someone honked their horn very loudly. There was a pause, then they did it again. Another pause, and then a loud banging at my door. I open it in my dressing gown, and a (watch this instant prejudice…) brash looking man in a shiny [...]
Why am I so sad? Removing the two ego minds at the source of our pain.
In a recent article I tried to explain how self-grasping and self-cherishing, and the delusions they spawn, entirely undermine our happiness. Luckily, nothing is fixed – if we can understand these two ego-centered states of mind at the source of our pain and dissatisfaction, that’s the first step to removing them. We don’t need them [...]
What’s stopping us from dissolving everything into emptiness?!
As quoted in this previous article, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso says that if we have some experience of emptiness: “Everything becomes very peaceful and comfortable, balanced and harmonious, joyful and wonderful.” Countless meditators before us have had this experience and there seems to be no reason to think that Buddha or our kind teachers are just [...]
Waves of destruction ~ Japan’s tsunami revisited
A year ago, on March 11, Japan suffered from a terrible earthquake and tsunami that left an estimated 19,000 people dead, and many more wounded and homeless. (I wrote an article about it here.) It doesn’t seem like a year ago to me, but it probably feels like a decade to those who still have [...]
Trust v. personal responsibility
Trusting holy beings… I recently renamed the feral cat Korska “Nelson”; I figure it might help him to be named after one of my great heroes, Nelson Mandela, who triumphed over adversity just as I want this little guy to do, in his own way. Nelson is coming along, albeit very slowly and in fits [...]
