Mindfulness and meditation in the midst of life

No suffering without craving

7 Jun 2025

The farmer cannot make the crops grow. The farmer can only provide the conditions for the crops to grow The four noble truths are arguably the central teaching of Buddhism. They are not intended as laws beyond investigation, as though they were commandments written on free-standing stone obelisks. The noble truths are actually an expression of conditionality, of dependent arising...
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The utility of doubt

4 Jun 2025

In Zen Buddhism, the greater your doubt, the greater will be your enlightenment. That is why doubt can be a good thing. If you are too sure, if you always have conviction, then you may be caught in your wrong perception for a long time. —Thich Nhat Hanh Doubt is one of the major hindrances to the Buddhist way of life. This kind of doubt isn't a healthy questioning—everything can be...
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The three imps

4 Jun 2025

Next time you're berating other drivers or complaining about the weather, reflect on whether your distress is the result of misguided expectations about life The previous post hinted at the relationship between dependent arising and emptiness. That is, the teaching of how phenomena arise in dependence on other phenomena, which means that they are "empty of inherent existence" as the...
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Inside the hall of mirrors

4 Jun 2025

Imagine realising that what you had always thought to be yourself was only a reflection in a mirror. This post is about a way of looking at the elements of human experience as mutually dependent on each other, like a hall of mirrors. The analogy of a mysterious machine Imagine you are on a beautiful deserted island and you find a machine not far from the beach, nestled in a grove of palm trees....
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True rest

7 May 2025

Restlessness is one of the hindrances. We need to rest. It’s interesting that an always-on culture has interpreted restlessness as being purely a mental agitation, a habit to be corrected instead of being an actual need to rest, physically and mentally. This is a cultural blind spot for us. If we hear the dhamma filtered through our cultural conditioning, we will hear something like, "Keep...
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