If the mind is agitated by different things and you can’t concentrate, try taking an extra–deep breath until the lungs are completely full, and then release all the air until there is none left inside. Do this several times, then re–establish awareness…
To allow the body to be painful when it needs to be, without regarding it as a bad thing, can be a liberating experience, a relief even, because there is no further conflict in the mind. Of course it is difficult when pain is severe, but there is a way of separating oneself from it and changing one’s relationship to it…
A couple of years ago I experienced that commonplace modern disaster, the breakup of a marriage. It’s always a trauma when two people who have thrown in their lot together split up.
These kinds of symbols, forms and conventions can be used for awareness rather than for developing worldly attitudes or attachments to becoming some kind of Buddhist…
‘One thing I teach, dukkha and release from dukkha.’
The Buddha
The fact is that however many tricks a student may have in his repertoire, he will not be able to do any of them, because he has no balance…
Contemplate your own goodness. In England sometimes, we don’t dare do that because it sounds like boasting. Or we may be afraid of inflating our egos…
The Chinese character for ‘Dharma’ is written with the components for ‘water’ and ‘to leave’. This implies that water flows from a high place to a low place.
Buddhism now 