These ideas brought an overwhelming sense of joy to me. It meant I was not a helpless victim of circumstance or fate, as I had thought.
Diana St Ruth
Buddhism isn’t really a religion, is it? By Diana St Ruth
A few stares of disbelief and awkward silences was enough for me, if I ever had the temerity to mention my heartfelt interest. So I lived with a private kind of Buddhism while in other respects living a typical working-class English life in a city in the late fifties and sixties…
Snakes, Ladders, and Utopia, by Diana St Ruth
The practice of Buddhism, however, is not to go up and down with those changing conditions—feeling sad when things are not as we want them to be, and happy when they are. The Buddha’s teaching is pointing towards understanding this world…
A moment of realisation, by Diana St Ruth
A moment of realisation about the way we operate in the world can open doors in our mind for the light to come in and bring insight. It may cause us to cringe a bit when we reflect on how we’ve been in the past, a very uncomfortable feeling. On the other hand…
Our culture doesn’t encourage too much contemplation on birth and death
We see and know impermanence as a constant. And that is liberating. All the mental suffering about what is going to happen to us, about being this or that person who will eventually disappear, about becoming ‘nothing’, is dissipated and this moment becomes a vast timelessness. The Buddha called it ‘birthlessness’ and ‘deathlessness’, freedom from birth and death…
A Handful of Pain, by Diana St Ruth
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…
First steps into Buddhist meditation
You cannot change the past, arrange the future to suit yourself, or make other people say and do the things you want them to say and do. All of your power is contained within this moment, related to this particular body and mind. And this is a very powerful position to be in…
The Grandmotherly Kindness of the Zen Masters, Diana St Ruth
As far as the Zen masters are concerned, however, they have always been motivated by something beyond this material world and even when they are being apparently extreme or severe, if they are genuine, far from being cruel or uncaring they will be acting from a grandmotherly kindness…
Buddhism now 