The most important breakthrough is the uprooting of personality view. Recognizing that the self is really just an artificial creation and not an ultimate entity is the first really profound insight. It’s a very significant insight into impersonality. The self is interpreted in different ways, but one primary interpretation is that it has control. This is my body, I can tell it what to do. This is…

A lot of the time we’re thinking and that isn’t always good or helpful. Thinking (unlike thoughtful attention) is about constructing: a future, a past, another person – or oneself. It’s often about creating an alternative to the direct experience of the here and now. And there’s stress in that. So what we do for clarity and calm is to come into the present and rest in that. It’s like our thinking…

Can we allow ourselves to perceive the body as a process? This process is the four elements working together, building, forming, falling apart, over and over again. When we do this, it becomes more difficult to identify with the body as being ‘me’ and ‘mine’, even as an entity in itself. The body as a static entity dissolves and we begin to see it in terms of the elements working in this way. What…

One of the striking things, given that this is the Buddha’s best- known discourse on loving-kindness, is that it is about a third of the way into the sutta before the Buddha even mentions loving- kindness. I think this is great, in the sense that loving-kindness is to be cultivated, but that there is also that which should be done to get to that point. We need to be skilled in goodness and know th…

Everything is created by our minds. The eyes see images, the ears hear sounds, the nose smells aromas, the tongue tastes flavors, the body feels sensations, and the heart experiences emotions. But the mind is aware of all these things. It knows them and it thinks about them, imagining them to be this or that. When our mindfulness and wisdom are strong, we can see these creations for ourselves. But…

Under the veneer of contentment, we are too busy to see what we are doing, too restless to stop or to keep our minds still. It isn’t just a shifting around so that we can find the right posture or the right set of conditions in life; it’s a deep inner angst. At first this sense of disquiet manifests as nascent feelings that we would never have allowed ourselves to feel before and that expose how w…

When we first look closely at the human mind, we may experience suffering from our approach to the practice itself. We may struggle to make peace with ourselves. We may experience tiredness or confusion. We may suffer – without understanding the roots of suffering, without knowing how to let it go, how to let it die its own natural death. Why is this so? It is because the mind looks for safety, an…

Training your mind is like training yourself to master a sport. Part of the training is focused in the practice sessions, i.e. what you’re doing right here as you’re meditating or as you’re doing walking meditation–the skills you want to work on, because we are working on skills. We try to develop Right View, Right Resolve, all the way down through Right Concentration. There’s Right Concentration…

With a little bit more practice, you find that you can stay here, stay balanced here more solidly than you could floating around in your old habits. Be as immediate as possible with each breath. Sense it as soon as it comes in, as soon as it stops. Try to sense any sense of discomfort that comes when the breath begins to get a little bit too long as you pull too long, and as you try to squeeze it…

We have all the different sense organs: the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, body, and mind. If you review those, you’ll see that there’s a particular logic in that sequence. The phenomena that arise in the eye are distant. There’s space. They’re out there. You can see things that don’t see you. You’re removed from them. The eye is very good for the hunter because it’s good at sharply defining…