Worry, care, depression, gloom, all of these are targets of the universal raider. Anxiety is drawn like a spider to the web in which we struggle, and thrives on our resistance. But its strength is drawn from this and only this. The energy released by our struggling and resistance is what attracts it…
The metta practice rests on the basis of loving oneself, or at least liking oneself. Without this step, no further progress is possible, either in the metta practice or in the practice of any of the Brahma Viharas (the Divine Abidings). And with the English — the men at least — this first step was proving very difficult, if not impossible…
Never mind the broken chairs and the shattered table, and the light that didn’t work, it’s all an adventure, every bit of it, so we might as well enjoy it even when everything seems to be going wrong. In fact, the moments when it goes wrong are often the times to throw the doors wide and invite all the troubles in, the happiness, the despair. ‘Greet them with laughter,’…
Life in the West is full or problems and traumas, and we move from one to the next like a blind person finding the way along a rope bridge. We can, it is true, refuse to see the ‘bad’ things, or simply live on the surface of life, but that merely produces another kind of unhappiness with the voice of our lost psyche calling us from a long way away, with not only the problem shelved but our humanity and the richness and colour of our lives as well…
So across this transient world, we build a web of likes and dislikes, demands and resistances to anchor our days, to make them subject to our wishes and to armour them against the very fears that these structures and barriers generate…
Perhaps this is why Buddhism—almost the oldest of the great religions—has had so little effect on the others…
‘I suppose very few of us have passed through even a short period of existence without having noticed the different qualities of dreams. There are those that are evanescent; then there are those that possess you and you can’t shake off; and yet others that may be the urge of your life—its guiding star. Nor can the most superficial fail to observe how dreams and life react on one another.’
When I lost my mother after looking after her for five years, not only had I lost the last member of my family, but I also lost the main motivation for getting up in the mornings.
Buddhism now 