The effort to be aware
18 Jul 2024
So, what's been happening? A few weeks ago I felt as though I'd fallen in love with simple mindfulness again. It seemed so natural to be present with moment-to-moment experience. When sitting on the cushion, I didn't really long for anything else to happen outside of this quiet contentment. No longing to get anywhere or trying to create a special feeling.
It's hard to know what creates these...
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Creating a practice plan for the day
22 Jun 2024
Just this week, I've started being a bit more formal about my intentions for practice in the day ahead. I've started looking at the specifics of the day ahead and planning how I will bring mindfulness and other aspects of Buddhist practice into that situation and how I intend to negotiate any obstacles. The idea came to me when I realised I don't necessarily have to have the perfect approach to...
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Non-identification and working with the aggregates
15 Jun 2024
I've been drafting a few complicated pieces for this blog, about the signless concentration of mind, about meta-cognition, about systems thinking. These are all topics I want to say something about, but might also require a lot of detail and scholarly effort. Instead, I'm sitting in the garden in the sunshine, writing in a notebook and listening to Miles Davis and the theme I want to discuss is...
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How I am practising
6 May 2024
In two meditation groups I belong to, people recently expressed an interest in learning more about how other people practise. So I decided to write a little snapshot of what I’m doing—more or less—on the cushion at the moment.
On the cushion
When the house is quiet in the morning, I sit on my meditation bench and begin to let the mind settle while tuning in to what’s here. It may be that a...
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Appropriate attention: notes on a home retreat
22 Apr 2024
I sat an online at-home retreat with Gavin Milne over the weekend. It was very interesting to be practicing in a hybrid space: letting go of some distractions (and noticing getting hooked by others) and emphasising practice but also being present and connected with family and having that context of bringing practice into every posture, task, and situation—or trying to! I kept some notes, as I...
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