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[…] heal from this form of betrayal, so pay careful attention to the quality of your relationship with your teacher. You, as a student, have two responsibilities: To practice what is taught as it is given To apply the practice in your life If you do not trust that the teacher, in the role of […]
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In order to help clarify the nature and purpose of deity practice, I discuss it here in a way that gives one the actual flavor of this practice; that is, the sense of what might actually be happening experientially in deity practice. I also suggest an approach to deity practice that doesn’t depend on […]
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Everyone knows the old adage “You can’t see the forest for the trees.” In the work environment, the trees are the immediate pressures you feel: demands and directives from above, needs and problems from below. The forest is the bigger picture, the picture beyond the immediate pressures. Most people react to remove pressures as quickly […]
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This greed for results, for something dramatic, undermines our practice completely. The effects of meditation are subtle and take time to mature. When we are constantly looking for some kind of sign or attainment from our practice, we are essentially looking outside ourselves.
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[…] James Carse writes in The Religious Case Against Belief: War presents itself as necessary for self-protection, when in fact it is necessary for self-identification. When, in your practice, the world drops out from under you, you find yourself in a different place. You are completely open. All sense of opposition is gone. What happens […]
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When I look back on my first years of Buddhist practice, let’s say the first ten to twelve years, my practice was essentially a reaction to suffering. Most of the time I didn’t know what I was reacting to. I put a great deal of effort into practice, into study, into serving my teacher. […]
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[…] form of knowing is not something intellectual or conceptual. It takes effort to keep that silence in our hearing, and constant attention. Attention, attention, the key to practice, so many teachers have said. It’s true. When we come to know, even a little, this truly miraculous and open nature of our being, we begin […]
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[…] comes out of our confusion, how it doesn’t quite fit with the situation. And as we make this effort over and over again, we will find that we begin to speak with attention in exactly the same way that we come to breath with attention in our meditation. This is how we practice right speech.
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[…] ended late in the evening. We had daily and weekly rituals and much preparatory work and clean up. We practiced different meditation methods, with set periods for practice, set periods for study, and a set number of days on each method. With so much to do and to learn, there was no free time. […]
