Hi Everyone, This last weekend was Wesak which, as many of you may now is the time when Buddha’s birthday is celebrated. For me the weekend ended up with a little reflection on what the qualities that you need to be inwardly wealthy enough to commit to a lifetime of inner growth, and holding the [...]
Hi Everyone, This week’s article gives some basic pointing out instructions for how we can transform our ordinary, deluded self sense into the universal or expanded self sense of a Bodhisattva, someone whose primary motivation is to liberate all living beings from their pain and bestow upon them lasting freedom and happiness. It is 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 [...]
Here are six stages or realizations in the journey toward the experience of enlightenment as explained by the great wisdom traditions of the world that emphasize meditation as a daily practice. Of course each of them would explain it with different words and emphasizing slightly different aspects of the path, but broadly speaking these six points would be common. [...]
Hi Everyone, Please find below a recording of a free talk that I did last week entitles “What is Meditation, and the Role That it Can Play in Transforming Our Life”, Enjoy! I have placed a resume of the talk content beneath the recording. Yours in the spirit of the journey, Toby [Audio clip: view [...]
Why Should we Meditate on Gratitude? What are we Trying to Achieve? The function and purpose of meditating on gratitude is to train our attention in such a way that even when we are under pressure and feeling unhappy in some way we never lose sight of the things in our life that are there [...]
What does it mean to be expressing love fully in your relationships? There are many ways to answer this question, but one answer deriving from classical sources is that you should aim to have three types of love functioning fully in your day to day interactions with others and yourself. These types of love are [...]
One of the great illusions that we often battle with is the feeling of being isolated and alone. This feeling of loneliness and isolation can exact a heavy toll upon our psyche. There are three approaches that we can take to this challenge: Get more comfortable with being alone Reach out to other people and [...]
Hi Everyone, When we see natural objects in a landscape, such as trees, rocks, cliffs, mountains, lakes and so forth, very often we judge them to be beautiful. For example when we see the way in which a trees branches and bark has twisted and morphed over time we think of this as a tree [...]
Hi Everyone, This is effectively the New Year post, so I thought it would be nice to do a piece on loving and being loved. The new January 2011 schedule for Meditation and Qi gong classes and workshops is out, do check it out, there is plenty of good stuff for beginners and more advanced [...]
