Hi Everyone, This week’s newsletter looks at Zen meditation practice from two lenses, firstly there is the class this coming Wednesday 22nd February entitled “Zen and the Flower of Life” which looks at Zen practice from the perspective of the original teaching of the Buddha from which Zen meditation is said to derive. Secondly, this week’s meditation [...]
Hi Everyone, This week’s article focuses on the value of adopting a periodically more minimal mental approach to our life’s challenges. Quick reminder for those of you in Singapore of the Qi Gong Meditation classes starting this coming Wednesday. Yours in the spirit of the journey, Toby Dropping Your Conceptual Leaves Seasonally [...]
Traditionally within the Wheel of the Western Year (by that I mean the progression of the year through the seasons) there are two times when the “veil” between the worlds of our inner and outer perception are thinned, making visionary and dream experiences somewhat more pronounced and vivid. These two times are before and after May [...]
An emergent time is a time in history where there is a large amount of change, innovation, transformation and transformation going on within society and on the Planet as a whole. All of this change and transformation can also give rise to the perception that there is more conflict, stress, confrontation, agitation and despair in [...]
I recently listened to a talk by Roger Walsh on the Science of Meditation (well worth having a listen to, click the link to do so). In the talk he mentions that he spent about three years researching for his book “Essential Spirituality”, reading books and interviewing different spiritual teachers of the worlds great wisdom [...]
Before you start something it is always worth spending a moment thinking “Why am I doing this? What is my primary motivation?” If you have a definite reason for doing something, then you can keep it as your focus, thus ensuring greater peace of mind and a higher likelihood of getting what you want from [...]
Normally when we think about anxiety and its causes things such as money, relationships, negative emotions and the like come to mind as primary causes of our mental anxt. However what about freedom? Søren Kierkegaard said “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”, and the existential philosophers and therapists have pointed out very clearly that as often as not [...]
Does liberation in the spiritual sense from suffering mean that we no longer feel any pain? I tend to think that we will still feel pain of one form or another after we have been liberated, but that pain will not be added to by additional mental suffering and negativeness. To be liberated from suffering means [...]
This morning on the way to work I observed a chicken that had escaped from someone’s garden. It was nervously trying to get back into the garden through the fence by marching up and down the same section of the fence looking for a way in, even though it was very clear that there a [...]
This is an interesting quote from Herman Hess’s “Steppenwolf”: “…his whole life was an example that love of one’s neighbour is not possible without love of oneself, and that self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same isolation and despair.” I find it very interesting to [...]
