How to overcome anxiety
Sometimes dubbed “the age of anxiety”, people are reportedly experiencing a lot of (di)stress in this modern age. Up to a third of the UK population, for example, will suffer from anxiety disorder or...
View ArticleBreaking free
As a further incentive to ditch the attachment and grow the love, as described in this article, I find the following analogy very helpful. Buddha likened samsara to a prison. Imagine you’ve been in a...
View ArticleTime to rebel!
There seems to be a fair bit of hubris around lately, like it’s catching or something, and some of it is quite dangerous. Deluded pride is more about bending the world to our own will, thinking we are...
View ArticleThink globally, act locally
We cannot change everyone. We cannot get everyone to behave. You may have noticed this. So being the change we want to see in the world — as Mahatma Gandhi put it in equally trying times — really needs...
View ArticleHey, what’s going on?!
A friend just told me that the Republicans are winning by 36,000 votes in this great state of Colorado. It gave me pause, again!, as so many times I have been wondering of late, hey, what’s going on?!...
View ArticleA way out of this fine mess …
I have been at the Fall Festival in Toronto this week, which has been an incredible pleasure, one that could only have been improved upon if you had all been here as well. During one lunch with my old...
View ArticleTired, yet, of living a cliché?
On the last day of the recent Kadampa Summer Festival, the life story of Buddha Shakyamuni was shown, as it always is, and well received. Buddha’s story is a great story, and ours can be a great story...
View ArticleEver had self-loathing?
Delusions are inner diseases. When our mind is uncomfortable or ill at ease, we can accept that we are experiencing mental dis-ease, some level of uneasiness, without thinking, “I am a disease.” (By...
View ArticleI choose everything
I’m on a roll with this monsters in the basement theme, so bear with me for one more article. Our delusions project problems “out there”, in all the directions they face. Work problems, relationship...
View ArticleDealing with our demons
Of the three steps to overcoming our delusions taught in the mind-training teachings of Buddhism, the first is recognizing or identifying them. And that means not just intellectually but in our own...
View ArticleA perfectly ordinary theft
I seem to be here again at the Denver DMV. I thought I’d left this grimy place forever, but here I am back all over again. “Weren’t you here just the other day”? asked the man who failed me in my first...
View ArticleAccepting unhappiness without panicking
Another instinctive reaction to hurt feelings (accentuated these days by 24/7 availability) is to try and distract ourselves from them, hoping that by sweeping them under the carpet they’ll go away....
View ArticleGetting perspective on hurt feelings
I’m sinking in the quicksand of my thought And I ain’t got the power anymore. ~ Quicksand As mentioned in the previous article, step one in transforming our mind — gaining power over our lives and...
View ArticleExploring our potential for peace and omniscience
We all need to be able to let go of our unhappiness. This, to put it mildly, is a Very Useful Skill – unless of course we don’t mind hanging onto misery for a few more years, a few more decades, a few...
View ArticleThe Biggest Problem Ever
Did you have a problem today? Did it seem to fill your mind, even if, stepping back from it, you could see that it was not a huge big deal? If the answer is yes, it would not be surprising. This is...
View ArticleFeel free to change your mind
With attachment born of ignorance we are always splitting ourselves off from our actual happiness, the happiness of our own peaceful mind. Holding onto an isolated real “self”, distanced from “other”,...
View ArticleHow to catch a problem before it catches you
This carries on directly from this last article. My lovely dad turned 80 on October 2nd, and we were discussing the meaning of (the rest of his) life. He told me he’d been perusing the obituaries to...
View ArticleHow do I get rid of problems? Buddha’s advice
A million-dollar question. If we could answer this, we could get finally be free of the wretched things. In fact, this would be priceless information. Buddha did answer this. The whole of Buddhism, or...
View ArticleStop grasping
To me the spiritual path seems largely a process of letting go – first of the expectations that this life is the be all and end all of existence, then of the expectations of samsara working out, then...
View ArticleBuddhism and the pursuit of happiness
The last article, based on the Spring Festival introduction, looked at how deceptive samsara’s enjoyments are. Of course its sufferings are no fun either. Now I have boarded my second plane, from San...
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