Author: Luna Kadampa

 9.5 mins read. The more I hear about this war, the more angles there are, the more difficult seem the choices. On one level, it’s very simple – stop hurting and destroying people because that’s bad and peace makes everyone happier. On another level, the delusions in the minds of living beings are relentless quagmires and it is delusions that are creating this war. Power struggles tend to spring from self-grasping ignorance, greed, and aversion, the three poisons that complicate everything and destroy all our lives. As Gen-la Dekyong, the General Spiritual Director of the New Kadampa Tradition, said in…

7.5 mins read. It might be tempting when faced with the possibility of this escalating into World War 3 to go to the extremes of either freaking out or pretending it is not happening. But there is another way to approach such sorrow and danger, and it is compassion. This might seem counterintuitive – surely if I open my eyes wide to this suffering, which is what compassion involves, I’m going to freak out even more?! I can only take so much horror and then, to save my sanity, I surely need to switch over to a comedy on Netflix?…

Flying through the clouds over London, I am imagining all of us flying in the higher sky of the Dharmakaya. How wonderful it’ll be when everyone is enjoying bodies of wisdom light, their clumsy fleshy bodies no longer holding them in. Our bodies are cages. These past two weeks with my mother have brought this home to me because she is trapped in a body of skin and bones that is twisting due to Parkinsons, with tissue-paper skin that tears too easily. Her left leg is bent up so her foot is by her waist. Her arms and hands are…

Before I go any further, a question for you all if you have a moment: What is prayer? How does it work? Do you pray and, if so, how do you pray? Please comment in the box below, thank you. I would like to share your wisdom in the next article. I’ve been wanting to talk about concentration for a while now, and with this week’s events I think now might be as good a time as any. For one thing, we need to get a move on in improving our concentration – the world is unstable because our minds…

9.5 mins read. Do you agree that identifying with our limitless Buddha nature is the start of identifying ourself correctly? As Venerable Geshe Kelsang explains in The Oral Instructions of the Mahamudra, it is because we have been identifying ourselves incorrectly for so long that we keep experiencing delusions and hallucinatory suffering.  Since beginningless time our way of identifying our self has been mistaken. We believe that our self that we normally see is our self. This belief is ignorance because our self that we normally see does not exist. How can a non-existent self be our self?! Yet here we…

 6.5 mins read.   In this last article, Identifying with our Buddha nature, I suggested why it’s a good idea to identify with our Buddha nature from the very outset of our meditation practice and just in general. Where, some people want to know, does Geshe Kelsang say you’re supposed to identify with your Buddha nature every time you meditate? Where is it explicitly explained? The most famous place is probably the gold nugget bit quoted in that last article. As Venerable Geshe-la says in The New Eight Steps to Happiness:   Whenever we meet other people, rather than focusing on…

8 mins read. A question … when you’re not identifying with your Buddha nature, what are you identifying with? Over the decades I’ve observed a couple of elements that seem to make all the difference in terms of whether or not people get deep experience and realizations of meditation. One is simply consistency, continuing to show up for our practice through thick and thin – as Buddha said, keeping a kettle on the stove over even a very low heat will cause the water to boil. The other is practicing confidently in the context of our potential. (Talking of decades…

7 minutos de lectura. (The English version of this article is here.) ¡Feliz día de Heruka! Y algo más: nos haríamos un gran favor al recordar que no practicamos Tantra en soledad, sino con la inmensa ayuda de las Dakinis y los Dakas, los Budas Tántricos. No siempre las personas lo ven, así que pensé decir algo al respecto, considerando que hoy es el mes de Vajrayoguini. La práctica de Vajrayoguini comienza con el yoga del dormir entre otras razones porque: Por la noche las Dakinis de los veinticuatro lugares sagrados visitan a los practicantes sinceros de Vajrayoguini y les…

7.5 mins read. What on earth are blessings?! You, who love all beings without exception, Are the source of happiness and goodness; And you guide us to the liberating path. ~ The Liberating Prayer And what does it mean to say that Buddhas are the source of our happiness? For example: Buddha’s function is to bestow mental peace on each and every living being every day by giving blessings. We know that we are happy when our mind is peaceful and unhappy when it is not. It is therefore clear that our happiness depends on our having a peaceful mind…

It’s no secret that humanity has been living through some difficult times and a lot of people have been struggling to stay afloat. Friends all over the world have told me they’ve been having a challenging two years. Some who were relatively carefree have been experiencing levels of anxiety they didn’t expect, for example, and I know what they mean. I read that therapists cannot keep up with demand because stress and other mental health issues are, not surprisingly, at an all time high. Samsara (the cycle of impure life explained by Buddha) was not exactly working out even before…