Everyday life puts us in a very peculiar position – it puts us in the peculiar position of having to support, maintain and promote a proposition that is astonishingly dumb, astonishingly lame, astonishingly ‘not worth the effort’. We are obliged to continually ‘talk the situation…
In meditation we allow everything to be what it already is. This isn’t something we have to try to do however – things already are what they are so where’s the need to ‘try’? This sounds very simple of course – and the basic idea…
There are two ways of approaching anxiety – one way is to approach it with a whole bunch of tools and methods and ‘skills’ (which is of course the aggressive way) whilst the other way is with gentleness and tolerance, and no attempted ‘forcing’. The…
We can’t ‘do’ change – that’s an absolute impossibility! ‘Change that we do’ is always purely for the sake of shoring up our sense of identity and ‘shoring up our sense of identity’ is not change. It’s ‘entrenchment’, it’s ‘digging in deeper’, obviously… Any…
All we know is aggression but because we don’t see our aggression for what it actually is, we just we just see it as the normal way of being in the world. We don’t have any other modality of existence, we don’t know of any…
‘Arrogance and anxiety are co-arising with the conditioned self’, says Tilopa. Which would we prefer? Is one any better than the other? Clearly not – if arrogance is ‘setting ourselves up for a fall’ then anxiety is ‘the fall’! Is setting oneself up for a…
The most counterproductive thing we can do with regard to our own emotional pain and mental suffering is to get ‘clever’ about it – which is to say, the most counterproductive thing we can do is to think about it! When we hear about ‘not…
The most helpful thing we can do for ourselves – and in the long run the only ‘helpful thing’ we can do for ourselves – is to be the compassionate witness of our own lives. This doesn’t tend to come easily however. Normally we…