Donate a tree for Christmas

For this blog I thought I’d share a transcript of a short talk I gave at our last retreat in Cornwall. It investigates how our meditation can become an act of generosity in our current time of great consumption in the face of a climate emergency. I hope you enjoy.

I’ve been sort of masquerading as teaching Vipassana for the last however many years, but how many people are actually feeling in their minds that their aspiration is to get off the wheel? And if not, why not?

Teaching people to meditate is a little bit like teaching people to swim. Like the first time you put someone who can’t swim in the water; there’s an awful lot of splashing about and panic and at first, it is basically an exercise in staying alive while you are in the water.

I thought I would share a discourse and meditation from our Winter Long Retreat in Inverness. The discourse is called Spirit and Soul and it formed an important thread that we explored through our meditation practice. I hope you enjoy.

How to ennoble your life…

J’aimerais partager ici un discours que nous avons récemment publié sur Insight Timer, ainsi qu’un extrait adapté de mon livre The Survival Guide to Staying Conscious (non traduit). J’espère que ça vous donnera envie à tous d’aller en pleine nature et de profiter des dernières semaines d’été.

As Christmas approaches and most of us start to wind down for our annual winter vacation, for some this is the toughest and loneliest time of year. The number of people on the streets of our cities these days seems to be increasing.

Meditation is such a vast field and when we start out we really didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into. If we look at the many apps on meditation that we can now access through the internet, we might be inclined to think meditation is an exercise in either calming down the mind (serenity) or learning to pay more attention to our present moment (mindfulness).

For this month I thought I would give everyone a taster lesson from our Journey Shared course on relationships. I have been trialling it for a couple of months now and the work is proving valuable and deep for those involved. I have decided to start it again in January so I thought it might be could to give you a flavour of the lessons in case anyone is thinking of joining then, and wanted to know more.

Burgs provides a guided meditation to help those who act in anger before they can realise the consequences of their actions.

I think there’s a little part of everybody that has an inkling, a hunch, a sense that there’s a mystery in the background behind this life that we haven’t quite clocked and we’d love to know what’s going on.

Quienes hayan asistido a nuestros retiros me habrán escuchado hablar de una profunda inteligencia curativa que funciona en el trasfondo de nuestras vidas. Además me habrán escuchado sugerir que la mayoría de las enfermedades que sufrimos (a menos que sea el resultado de una infección) resultan de una interferencia con esta inteligencia innata.

Any of you who have attended our retreats will have heard me talk often of a profound healing intelligence at work in the background behind our lives. You will also have heard me suggest that most of our sickness ( unless it is caused by infection) is caused by interference with this innate intelligence.

I have received a few enquiries from some of you who have been meditating for a while with me now, about how you should plan the development of your practice over a longer period of time. So I thought I would write a few guidelines for you. Forgive me for the length of the document, but I do feel that when you have time it will be helpful for all of you to reflect on this.

Digital Detox - A brief guide on how you can make the environment you spend time in more supportive to health and happiness.

So in this blog I wanted to go into a little bit more about the subtle energetic architecture of the body so that you understand the mechanism by which we accumulate a charge around the experiences we have in life that then goes on to condition how we react to what we experience in the future.

This week I would like to share an audio recording from our Vipassana retreat. The recording is taken from a questions and answers session on retreat where I am trying to clarify and outline some of the key points of Vipassana practice.

In this blog, I wanted to fill out your understanding of the process of meditation and then to see how it’s affecting us at a very deep level, so we can really understand the profound changes that are happening in the body and in the mind whilst we sit.

So concentration, you should see like a craft, something that takes great endeavor and commitment to reach a state of mastery. It is a parami and our capacity for practicing concentration is one of the baselines of our mind.