True humility comes from exchanging self with others, which is a blend of compassion and wisdom. As the great mind-training practitioner Geshe Langri Tangpa describes it: Whenever I associate with others May I view myself as the lowest of all. This is not a nebulous attitude but rooted in the clear understanding that cherishing a self that doesn’t exist is never going to work and that all the happiness there…
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Does how we view others come down to what we want out of life? If our main interest is in worldly enjoyments and achievements – for example we crave wealth or accolades – others can be in…
A guest article The Walk for Peace, which has captured the imaginations and hearts of millions of people, ends today in Washington DC. In this guest article, Jan Jemson describes this walk and then shares how it…
One of the things I’ve been thinking I’ll miss about Colorado is the endless space. It may be just “karmic wallpaper”, as a Buddhist nun friend helpfully put it; but the skies are huge, the windows are…
Some time has elapsed since I started talking about the emptiness of time, but there is only now, and now is the time. So here we go, carrying on from this: Wherever we go, there we are. …
Someone sent me an article this morning with this title, which I have shamelessly stolen, and the byline: A single act of kindness reminded me that, despite so much evidence to the contrary, the better angels of…
Hello everyone, happy holidays. Talking of which, I was contemplating this prayer the other day, one of the four immeasurables: May no one ever be separated from their happiness. This is often explained as referring to the…
8 mins & a video An old friend of mine, a naturopath, has had a lot of success in healing people simply by telling them…
A recent article in the New York Times reports the findings of scientists at Harvard that people are happier when their minds do not wander…
In Buddhism, we train to solve our own and everybody else’s problems through compassion and wisdom. This is a bit different to the usual way…
I’m doing something a bit unusual in this blog article, which is simply encouraging anyone who is reading it and who is interested in Buddhism…
In the previous article on Tantra, I explain a meditation for overcoming attachment and other delusions that is derived from Buddha’s Tantric methods. Now I want…
Karma is a natural law that governs us, like the law of gravity. It’s not the same as fate or predestination because we can change…
The other day I saw a little dude with his surfboard looking disappointedly at the ocean – it was clearly his first day of vacation…
It might be tempting when faced with the day’s headlines — suffering, and more suffering — to go to the extremes of either freaking out…