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.
Marcus Aurelius: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself…”
We can’t choose what happens to us in life, but we can choose how to respond to it. This piece of practical wisdom is found in the Buddhist tradition, but was also a cornerstone of Stoic philosophy. Bodhipaksa explains how we can untangle ourselves from the stories we tell ourselves about our experience.
Marcus Aurelius is my favorite Stoic philosopher. The Stoics, if you’re not familiar with them, were a school of … Click to read more »
Barbara Sher: “We are like violins. We can be used for doorstops, or we can make music.”
We all want to be happy, but often we’re not. Bodhipaksa argues that this is because of the way we treat ourselves as a thing that lacks happiness, and happiness as a thing to be grasped.
In a parable in the Buddhist teachings, a king hears the sound of a lute for the first time and asks to see what produced such sweet music. A lute is produced, but the king is not satisfied. He … Click to read more »
John Dewey: “The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.”
Dewey’s saying echoes Buddhist notions of impermanence and not-self. Bodhipaksa points out that the Buddhist position is not merely descriptive of how things are. Rather it amounts to a technology of happiness — a set of perspectives and tools that allows us to create more deeply fulfilling lives.
One of the most crippling — and often unacknowledged — beliefs we can have in that the self is something fixed and unchanging. When we have … Click to read more »
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
For Bodhipaksa, faith is not a belief in things that have no evidence, but confidence in our ability to move in the direction of greater freedom and happiness.
Some years ago, two friends took me rock-climbing in Colorado. I’d only ever climbed with ropes once before, and that had been many years earlier, so really I was a complete beginner. And nervous.
I found myself suspended half-way up a cliff, in a state of … Click to read more »
G.K. Chesterton: “The true object of all human life is play.”
The bodhisattva moves through life elegantly, “in the zone” and in a state of playful “flow,” and he can do this because he has abandoned any clinging to the idea of self. “Let go of your sense of self; you have nothing to lose but your suffering,” Bodhipaksa tells us.
I think Chesterton was absolutely right when he said that the object of life is play. The best kind of life we can live, … Click to read more »
Henri Matisse: “When we speak of nature it is wrong to forget that we are ourselves a part of nature.”
If science is about the study of cause and effect in the physical world, meditation is, Bodhipaksa argues, a form of inner science that helps us to understand how to avoid creating pain for ourselves and others.
Matisse said: When we speak of nature it is wrong to forget that we are ourselves a part of nature. We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we … Click to read more »
Richard Wagner: “We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of the word. The fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness…”
Wagner’s advice, that we need to learn to die, may bring up thoughts of our mortality: thoughts we may not be comfortable dwelling upon. But Bodhipaksa suggests learning to die really means learning to live fully, embracing the ungraspable flow of life.
In Wagner’s epic Ring cycle, Siegfried is the hero precisely because he lives by a code: never to let your life be shaped by fear of its end.
Religion is often supposed … Click to read more »
Publilius Syrus, “To do two things at once is to do neither”
The other day I read about a family of six who were wiped out when a truck-driver plowed into their vehicle. He’d allegedly been driving and attempting to look at a laptop screen at the same time.
Not all multitasking is that catastrophic, but nevertheless attempting to juggle too many things in a short space of time is causing us stress, reducing our productivity, and making it harder to maintain focus when we need … Click to read more »
Aldous Huxley: “We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love. Love is a mode of knowledge…”
Halfway between “the season of goodwill” and Valentine’s Day, Bodhipaksa looks at Huxley’s understanding of what love really is. Is love a feeling, or is it a way of knowing?
What do we mean when we say the word “love”? What does it really mean to love someone? In what way is love “a mode of knowledge.” When we’re talking about the fact that we love ice cream we obviously mean something very different … Click to read more »
Ursula K. Le Guin: “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.”
Everything’s impermanent, but rather than be depressed by this fact we can use it to our advantage. Bodhipaksa looks at the Buddhist practice of developing lovingkindness and offers six lessons that can help us keep love alive.
Buddhism teaches that everything’s impermanent, which can seem like a real downer until you look more closely into what that means. At first glance it can seem rather depressing: I’m impermanent, and everything I love … Click to read more »
Mark Twain: “Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol…”
Bodhipaksa explores the relationship between hats, iPods, desires, and needs. And also figures out what the Pali for “Palm Pilot” is. Oh, and he also offers a radical approach to dealing with distraction in meditation.
“Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.”
Twain argues that when you find yourself desiring, say, a hat, it’s … Click to read more »
Blaise Pascal: “All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room”
Everyone is prey to distractedness, to seeing solace in activity as an escape from experiencing ourselves. In fact this is one of the major obstacles to a meaningful life. Bodhipaksa argues, however, that the force underlying our distractedness is a creative one, and that properly channeled it can take us all the way to enlightenment.
I’ve always been fond of this saying from Pascal’s Pensées, which reminds me that not being at peace with … Click to read more »
Jules Petit-Senn: “It’s not what we have that constitutes our abundance, but what we appreciate.”
The words “abundance” and “spirituality” may not seem to go hand in hand but, Bodhipaksa argues, mindfulness, properly seen, is inherently enriching.
Once, on retreat, I was in a discussion group in which we were discussing the metaphors that encapsulated how we saw our spiritual practice. We all had very different ways of seeing what we were trying to do with our lives.
One person thought in terms of becoming a kinder person, … Click to read more »
Anaïs Nin: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom”
I sometimes think that my life has proceeded by way of a series of breakdowns and reconstructions. Such episodes haven’t exactly been frequent in my life, but they have represented important turning points. There have been three times I can recall where I’ve hit emotional bottom, learned something important about myself, and found a release that led to significant growth taking place.
One time I struggled with self-hatred and discovered that there was something … Click to read more »
Anne Morrow Lindbergh: “If one is estranged from oneself, then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others…”
Lindbergh’s comment reminds me that being fully aware of others involves awareness of oneself. There’s nothing particularly mystical about this — it’s just a question of psychology and neurophysiology.
On a psychological level, next time you’re interacting with someone, pay attention to what’s happening on a gut level. You’ll notice that there are sensations in the body, mostly focused on the abdomen, that arise in response to the other person. In … Click to read more »
Emo Philips: “I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”
Given that it’s the mind that makes up the stories with which we try to make sense of the world, perhaps it’s not surprising that the mind tells us the story that it is the most important part of ourselves.
We think of ourselves as distinguished from other animals by our thinking. When we think about what makes us uniquely us (as opposed to another individual human being) we often point to our memories … Click to read more »
Aldous Huxley: “Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle…”
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 »