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To drill down a bit on emptiness and mere appearance, both of which are invaluable contemplations during mandala offerings and life in general … some months before he passed away, Venerable Geshe Kelsang said: All phenomena their own emptiness appears as themselves. Otherwise all phenomena do not exist at all. In The Oral Instructions of Mahamudra, Venerable Geshe Kelsang’s most recent…

What is a day really for? I’ve seen four clips these past few days that illustrate the need to think about this if I want my life to have a deeper meaning. The first, and simplest, clip is just a stick person getting up each morning, going to work, coming home, going to sleep, getting up again, etc, in an endless loop. The endless to-do list The second is a more sophisticated version of this,…

Fairly dicey times here on Planet Earth. What direction are we headed in? In the introduction to Prayers for World Peace, which Geshe Kelsang gave us way back in 2001, he says: World peace is very important; we cannot ignore this. Once something happens, it will be too late. As you know, this world is now very delicate; it is almost as delicate as the life of a single person. The world situation…

Sorry everyone, this is the first time I have actually done this! But I posted the wrong verse for the outer, inner, secret, and thatness mandala offering in the latest article: Mandala offerings 3: how to visit a Pure Land. The correct verse is now in the article and also here: O Treasure of Compassion, my Refuge and Protector, I offer you the mountain, continents, precious objects, treasure…

AI generated (in case you were wondering, lol) If we get into the habit of making mandala offerings, we swiftly purify our mind and start to see the world in a purer way. For example, we may notice that we can still love people even when we disagree entirely with what they are saying. We can see past the insanity of their delusions to their Buddha nature and equal and unchanging wish to be happy.…

A very handsome man, to my eyes, just walked into this London café on what looked to be a date with a woman sitting here. “Lucky her,” I was half-thinking; but in the time it took for him to buy a coffee + croissant and offer this to her with a charming smile, she had changed her mind: “Oh, no, thank you, I actually just want to sit here with my own thoughts.” He smiled graciously and withdrew. A…

Lately I’ve had no time to develop a full blown article from up my sleeve, so I thought I’d share some gentle musings instead. Gratitude Simon from Eritrea told me he is in a good mood because he has three things: Health An unstressful job, by his reckoning, as he quite likes driving A shift that is almost over, lol He, like a lot of cabbies I’ve spoken to, loves London. He has a good attitude…

Guest appearance by the author of this popular article: Chronic pain & fatigue and the quiet power of Dharma.  Rushing to hospital recently with severe pain and other never-before-experienced symptoms, I was admitted for same-day emergency surgery. I hope the spiritual tips I followed below are helpful to you, too, if you ever find yourself in a similar situation. I’m a Buddhist, but I think…

True humility comes from exchanging self with others, which is a blend of compassion and wisdom. As the great mind-training practitioner Geshe Langri Tangpa describes it: Whenever I associate with others May I view myself as the lowest of all. This is not a nebulous attitude but rooted in the clear understanding that cherishing a self that doesn’t exist is never going to work and that all the…

Does how we view others come down to what we want out of life? If our main interest is in worldly enjoyments and achievements – for example we crave wealth or accolades – others can be in our way because they seem to be the competition or taking up our resources. There is only so much pie to go around, and we’ll develop attachment for those who help us get it and irritation for those who seem to…

One of the things I’ve been thinking I’ll miss about Colorado is the endless space. It may be just “karmic wallpaper”, as a Buddhist nun friend helpfully put it; but the skies are huge, the windows are large, the sun keeps shining, and there’s a wide rooftop opening to the mountains. The mountains themselves, that I have really loved spending time in, soar into endless space. Even the city of…

Some time has elapsed since I started talking about the emptiness of time, but there is only now, and now is the time. So here we go, carrying on from this: Wherever we go, there we are.  Why think about these deep topics?!   As the two wings of a bird propel them through space to their desired destination, as opposed to them staying forever grounded (no wings) or flying round and round in…

Someone sent me an article this morning with this title, which I have shamelessly stolen, and the byline:  A single act of kindness reminded me that, despite so much evidence to the contrary, the better angels of our nature are not necessarily doomed. My mother’s overnight carer Joanne Marie woke me early on Christmas Day to say that Sally was struggling to breathe. She seemed to be breathing,…