The final blog in my series of seven from 2013 is perhaps the juiciest of them all. I was all tender from a very intense, heart-breaking love affair when I wrote it. Its probing of the meaning of such heartbreak is spot on. How do we make sense of love and loss within the frame […]
This is a rather epic blog about the future and the nature of stress. Looking back from the vantage of 2022, I can see how the eight years of practice that followed this blog further anchored my day-to-day experience into a less stressy place. Interestingly, this blog was before I really plunged into the world […]
The sixth of the blogs from 2014. This one is quite self-contained and doesn’t require many annotations from 2022. There is a Nibbana element. This was a completely new idea to me. The Buddhist worldview is that there is a world made up of the four elements – water, fire, earth, and air. And that […]
The fourth of my re-vamped blogs from 2014. This one on play touches on the vexed question of boredom in meditation which usually surfaces in the form of: “Is this it?” Sucitto’s emphasis on play puts me in mind of Stephen Porges’ insight into play and the autonomic nervous system. I think my discovery of […]
This is the third of the set of seven blogs I wrote back in 2014 following a chance encounter with one of my Buddhist teachers Ajahn Sucitto. A lot of time has passed since I spoke to the teenagers at Steyning. They will be all be in their mid-Twenties by now. Perhaps some of those […]
Continuing my excavation of blogs from the past. These are my ponderings following a teaching that Ajahn Sucitto gave in Portugal. If you are struck by these insights about karma then you might like to tune in to the free course on Karma at the Mindsprings School. It’s part of a four-section exploration of Buddhist […]
Today is the birthday of one of my early Buddhist teachers, Ajahn Sucitto, who was the abbot of Cittaviveka monastery in East Sussex when I visited there. He still lives and teaches there, and you can find out more at his website ajahnsucitto.org. Back in 2013, I bumped into him on the way to Lisbon, where […]
“Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.” Soren Kierkegaard This is a very old book review from the back catalogue of my blog but seems still spot-on. Tom’s book was published in 2005, and 16 years on, the fearsome pace of life has only been a […]
This is an article I wrote almost 10 years ago but it still seems to hit the right note. COMING OUT IS GOOD FOR YOU. This article was written in response to several emails I received from young men around the world who had read an interview I gave to Gay Times in the summer […]
On the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, I was thinking about how we relate to those events – both at the time and after the event. We have our experience – traumatically close or vicariously distant – and then there is the “World’s experience” conjured up by a thousand newscasts, […]
