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I was doing this practice with Mingyur Rinpoche, and he was teaching what's known as the Abhidharma, which is a very old form of Buddhism.

This is an excerpt from the session on emotions on Monday (25th March 2024) where I give some tips about accessing the second field, the...

This is an edited transcript of a lovely discussion we had this Tuesday in our anxiety/stress class on Zoom. We were discussing the...

I got this interesting link from Reasons to be Cheerful (David Byrne's excellent website). How do concert spaces make themselves more...

If you've been following our Live Sessions of late, you may have noticed this word paramita cropping up again and again. Apologies if it...

I am a big fan of organised retreats. There is something so potent and human in being with a group of people who signed up for a week or...

I am entering one of my periodic periods of great doubt. I have these on a fairly regular basis - once every five years, perhaps - and...

A participant in the last retreat I led asked a very good question that often arises in retreats. “It’s all very well us pondering our...

The January full moon over the Seven Sisters, 2022. WHAT IS SITTING OUT? I’ve been exploring a practice called ‘sitting out’. It’s not a...

One of the MIndsprings members asked a very pertinent question today about starting out on her meditation journey: Where am I going to do...

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...

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...

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...

I have been really deeply inspired by the experience of leading the Dharma Days for Mindsprings. After my initial introduction to the...

Karen spoke about feeling trapped in the present. As meditators, we’re always encouraged to stay in the present and “be here now”, but...

In the first part of this blog on language and thinking, I argued that the human experience of thinking is fundamentally grounded in...

One of the lovely things about being a teacher for a while is that ex-students pop up in unusual places. I was really incredibly...

These are the Silence Islands where what outsiders would consider almost imperceptible aural amusements land like coconuts on the...

It feels like the start of term. After our unseasonably early Summer and hot spells, the year seems to have been teased into running a...

Samadhi, the forgotten twin sister of mindfulness practice, is a meditation approach that focuses on spaciousness and steadiness. In this...