We are made of star dust

I remember hearing this quote some time ago, perhaps even as a child, as the show it was from, Cosmos, was broadcast in the ’70s. It always made me think of the vastness of the Universe and yet the intimacy of […]

As we approach the end of the year there is the all too often repeated ritual of making New year resolutions: made to be broken a few weeks into the New Year! Why is this? One reason might be […]

Buddhism is often accused of being pessimistic due to the focus on suffering as the entry to the path of self knowing. It´s cettainly true that what attacted me at the beguining was this acknowlegement that there was suffering. And […]

Last week at the social after the class someone said that they had been interested in my comment in that week’s email about the change my mother saw in me as I went from a child into my teens – loosing some of my […]

Jeff Foster gives a beautiful analogy for how we can learn to relate to our difficult emotions, all those that we have learnt to see as unwanted and unwelcome, bad or shameful – pain, anger, fear, hatred, shame etc. He talks of […]

In this week’s blog we return again to the Loving Kindness practice. The Buddha described the well wishing one feels in this practice as being like the love a mother would feel for her only child. The Loving Kindness practice […]

Last year I started to explore lucid dreaming. This is a state where one becomes conscious that one is dreaming and is able to make conscious choices in the dream, knowing that it is a dream. One night I had a nightmare, which […]

Over the last few months I’ve been discussing with a friend a one day workshop we are putting together that will explore mindfulness and therapy. The central theme will be looking at how we can learn to hold with kindness […]

The theme over recent weeks has been “we are wounded in relationship and we heal in relationship”. Last week I reflected on how the Buddha placed compassion and non-violence at the heart of his teaching. The Loving Kindness practice was […]

Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox. Mind precedes all mental […]