§ “Sensual pleasure is like a drug: One taste and you get addicted. They say that with heroin it’s hard to break the habit, but this is even worse. It goes deep, right into the bone. It’s what made us get born in the first place, and has kept us circling through birth and death for aeons and aeons. There’s no medicine you can take to break the habit, to wash it out of your system, aside from the m…

We have all come together here to keep precepts, to develop meditation and to cultivate wisdom in our hearts. This intention is something very hard to find in the minds of people in this present day. When we have mindfulness and wisdom, we can see the harm there is in acting in unskillful ways and doing things which transgress the precepts. In keeping the five precepts, always maintaining them in…

A theme we explored on the Thanksgiving Retreat was “complaining and blaming.” I thought it would be a useful theme because our culture tends toward complaint. If I’m suffering, then the way to the end of suffering is to complain or blame. I’m suffering, therefore it’s somebody else’s fault. I’ve been treated unfairly. This isn’t right. It shouldn’t be this way. This is powerful conditioning in ou…

169. People outside may call us mad to live in the forest like this, sitting like statues. But how do they live? They laugh, they cry, they are so caught up that at times they kill themselves or one another out of greed and hatred. Who are the mad ones? 167. Some people are afraid of generosity. They feel that they will be exploited or oppressed. In cultivating generosity, we are only oppressing o…

Ajahn Dtoen came to visit us once, right after one of our winter retreats. During a question and answer period, I asked him if there were any exercises we could do to improve the wholesomeness of our speech or how to approach right speech as a practice. He saw right through me. He could see I was hoping there was some sort of technique I could apply before speaking that would solve all my problems…

Both on and off the cushion, we can examine how the activity of daily life is brought into the practice of Dhamma. In terms of the Noble Eightfold Path, many path factors are concerned with activities off the cushion. Developing samādhi with sitting is just one part of the path. There is so much more that one needs to do to practice well and correctly. If we think of practice as that which is onl…

I’d like to begin by presenting some exercises that take from ten seconds to a minute to do. These exercises use a practice I’ll call ‘Pause and Ask’. This is a very portable exercise; it’s brief and you can do it just about anywhere, standing up or sitting down. It entails first: the Pause. Stop doing and talking – and as that shift happens, relax. Relax the muscles in your shoulders, your jaw, a…

Q: Emptiness and equanimity. Is it correct to associate the two? Is equanimity the skillful attitude to take, to develop in the face of the emptiness of all conditioned phenomena? A: Don’t be in too great a hurry to develop equanimity. We first need to develop a sense of conviction and a sense of determination in the path. This has to be motivated by goodwill for ourselves and goodwill for all oth…

One practice that can help free the heart from compulsions is to meditate upon your own name. Begin by taking a moment to listen to the inner sound. Focus on that until the mind is clear and open, empty, and then simply voice your own name internally, whatever it might be. You listen to the sound of silence before, then the sound of silence within and then behind the sound of your name, and finall…

Listen to the sound of silence. Focus on it to steady the attention. Let the mind be as silent and alert as possible, and then raise the question, “Who am I?” First listen to the sound of silence. Then raise the question, and then attend; notice what happens when that question is sincerely asked, “Who am I?” We’re explicitly not looking for a verbal answer, a conceptual answer. But notice that the…