Wildmind's meditation blog
Wildmind's blogs are where you'll find book reviews, commentary, podcasts, and articles that don't fit neatly into the more structured guides to meditation that you'll find on the main part of the site. Articles are arranged below by date, and you can also browse by author and category using the links on the left.
Aldous Huxley: “Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle…”
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If meditation practice leads to the cessation of desire, then how are we to pursue spiritual goals? Are there good and bad kinds of desire? Can desire be spiritually helpful? Bodhipaksa explores a saying by Aldous Huxley in an attempt to shed some light.
“Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, … Click to read more »
Søren Kierkegaard: “Purity of heart is to will one thing.”
How do we find inner peace? How do we learn to overcome inner conflict? What is the guiding principle of our lives? Bodhipaksa takes a saying by the 19th century Danish theologian and philosopher, Kierkegaard, and looks at the Buddhist take on “willing one thing.”
“Purity of heart is to will one thing.”
- Søren Kierkegaard
This saying by Kierkegaard, the 19th century Danish theologian and philosopher, suggests that a mind divided is a mind unable … Click to read more »
Antoine de Saint Exupéry: “No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected.”
A common misquotation of a saying by a famous French writer gives Bodhipaksa pause for thought: are both the misquotation and the original saying true, even if they’re saying opposite things?
“No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.”
– Antoine de Saint Exupéry (1900-1944).
Antoine de Saint Exupéry was a famous French aviator and writer who most notably wrote the … Click to read more »
Muhammad Ali: “Children make you want to start life over.”
Probably all of us have looked at a child and wished we could start our lives over again. We can’t erase the past, but can we find a way to start over? Bodhipaksa, Buddhist practitioner of 25 years and a parent for one year, looks at the art of starting afresh.
I find something touching in the image of Ali, a giant of a man whose career involved a brutally physical … Click to read more »
Krishnamurti: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
The Buddha provocatively said that everyone who wasn’t enlightened was insane. Is this just hyperbole, or was he onto something? Bodhipaksa riffs on a quote by Krishnamurti in order to explore what it means to be mentally healthy.
I once had a disturbed young man come to a meditation class I was teaching in Edinburgh. I’d noticed as we gathered and during the meditation instruction and practice that he was unusually intense and that he … Click to read more »
George Bernard Shaw: “A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
Are you addicted to busyness? Do you have a sense that your life could hold more meaning? Bodhipaksa discusses George Bernard Shaw’s provocative quotation, and draws out some important lessons about how taking the risk of going deeper into our experience leads to greater fulfillment.
A classic definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, and yet our lives are often characterized by repeated … Click to read more »
Esther Lederer: “Hanging onto resentment is letting someone you despise live rent-free in your head.”
Do you end up with recurrent inner strife, where you argue with voices from the past? And do they argue back? Bodhipaksa explains how to make peace with your inner demons and stop past hurts from proliferating.
In the long run we inevitably hurt ourselves more than others do. Someone in the past did something that we found hurtful. They did or said something, or failed to do or say something, and we … Click to read more »
Marguerite Young: “Every heart is the other heart … the individual is the one illusion.”
One of the great paradoxes of spiritual practice is that when we empathize with others — sharing their happiness but also their pain — we feel more fulfilled. We’re more alive. We’re happier.
You’d think it would be the other way around: that if we shared another’s pain we’d be more unhappy, and that if we were to steer clear of getting involved in other’s difficulties then we would be happier.
But … Click to read more »
D.H. Lawrence: “Thought is a man in his wholeness, wholly attending.”
Often beginners to meditation think of thought as “the enemy.” They want to stop thinking altogether, to “have their minds go blank” (as if the mind would be blank without words running through it). This is a misunderstanding, but it’s a reasonable one. After all, who isn’t oppressed by the sheer quantity and the nature of their thoughts?
Thought runs wild. It’s relentless, seemingly tireless. Trying to suppress thought is … Click to read more »
Lorne Ladner, PhD. “When we ask what makes a happy and meaningful life, one problem that can arise is the tendency to respond with an answer that doesn’t really come from the heart.”
“When we ask what makes a happy and meaningful life, one problem that can arise is the tendency to respond with an answer that doesn’t really come from the heart. At such times the conscious mind has one answer and the unconscious has another, so we become conflicted.”
Lorne Ladner, Ph.D., The Lost Art of Compassion
Ladner brings up, in a particularly clear and articulate way, a central problem in living a life centered on the … Click to read more »
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time.”
“Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation for such method is love.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I feel it when driving — that desire to get back at the person who cuts me off, or who tailgates, or who … Click to read more »
The Dalai Lama: “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”
While it’s quite clear that others will benefit from our compassionate activity, the second part of His Holiness’s observation flies in the face of an assumption that is, for most of us, extremely deep-rooted: that is, the assumption being that my individual welfare is best served if I primarily focus on my interests.
But recent scientific research on happiness and brain function suggests that we do help ourselves — by becoming happier — … Click to read more »
Lyman Abbott: Do not teach your children never to be angry; teach them how to be angry.
Once when I was listening to the Dalai Lama talk in Edinburgh, he was asked a question that went something like this: “You keep talking about changing the world through meditation and compassion, but isn’t anger faster?” His Holiness answered to the effect that it’s precisely because anger acts so swiftly that we have to be wary of it.
His Holiness’s reply reveals Buddhism’s ambivalent attitude to the emotion of anger. Anger’s not necessarily a … Click to read more »
Thich Nhat Hanh: “The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.”
What exactly does Thich Nhat Hanh mean by “presence”? And how is it a gift to others?
When I first started consciously practicing mindfulness in my day-to-day activities, this was one of the first areas I explored. I watched what was running though my head one day as I chatted over lunch with a work colleague. I was dismayed to realize how often I was not really paying attention to him. As he talked … Click to read more »
Albert Einstein: “Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”
Work life is messy - not just the untidiness of papers stacked in an in-tray or equipment that hasn’t been put back in its place - the whole thing is incredibly messy because life itself is complex. There’s so much choice, so many decisions to make. There are so many things you could be doing, so much information you could be paying attention to, so many people who you could be networking with.
In … Click to read more »
Miles Davis: “Do not fear mistakes. There are none.”
Many years ago when I was in college, I performed a solo piano recital. Even though I prepared for months, on the day of the recital I was a nervous wreck. I still had several passages that I hadn’t been able to master, and that was just enough to shake up my confidence. I was all too familiar with every spot in those pieces that could trip me up. I remember taking a deep breath … Click to read more »
Lou Holtz: “Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.”
Lou Holtz is revered as one of the premier NCAA football coaches of our time. Among his many notable achievements, he led six college teams to championship games within two years of his taking the helm. In the case of the University of South Carolina, it was his leadership that engineered an amazing turnaround from the nation’s longest losing streak to a winning level unprecedented in the school’s 107-year history of competitive sports. In his … Click to read more »
Herman Melville: “We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.”
“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.”
- Herman Melville
Earlier this week, I watched an episode of NOVA, a public television series in the U.S. about current issues in science. The topic was climate change — and specifically how particulate pollution reduces the sun’s warming effects on the earth, and what this phenomenon implies about global warming.
One segment of the show in particular struck me quite deeply. According … Click to read more »
Chogyam Trungpa: “In the practice of sitting meditation you relate to your daily life all the time. Meditation practice brings our neuroses to the surface rather than hiding them at the bottom of our minds. It enables us to relate to our lives as something workable.”
Meditation is not escapism. In fact one could argue that burying ourselves in daily activities with no time set aside for reflection is a classic escapist activity. When we meditate we’re thrust into an awareness — often a very challenging awareness — of exactly what’s going on in our lives. There’s no escaping who we are: as we sit, thought after thought, emotion after emotion, wells up inside of us.
When we’re busy rushing from one … Click to read more »
Robert Collier: “Any thought that is passed on to the subconscious often enough and convincingly enough is finally accepted”
All too often thoughts set thoughts in motion with little or no conscious intervention on our part, creating an inner avalanche of ideation. Helplessly caught up in this endless cascade, we are swept away by the stories generated by our hopes and fears.
To change the metaphor, each thought sends forth an echoing cry, like an animal calling for its mate, and this cry penetrates the heart, evoking an emotional response. The end result is suffering, … Click to read more »