There’s a question Buddhist teachers like to ask, to tease their students towards a particular insight: when did you last see yourself? “A short while ago,” some of us reflexively reply. “I was washing my hands and I looked up and saw myself in the mirror.” “What you saw then was a reflection of your body,’ our teacher may reply. ...
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The Santa Clause-like “me”
I am pleased to offer the following excerpt from my book ‘Enlightenment to Go: Shantideva and the Power of Compassion to Transform your Life’. As a young child I remember the great excitement I felt about Santa Claus. Every year, as Christmas approached, his name would be invoked as a way of making me behave myself. While my parents,...
Enlightenment to Go – read the introduction here!
INTRODUCTION ‘If I have any understanding of compassion and the practice of the bodhisattva path, it is entirely on the basis of this text that I possess it.’ The Dalai Lama speaking about Shantideva’s “Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life” Often when the Dalai Lama ends a public speech, a member of the audience will ask: ‘Can...
Was Dr Dolittle onto something?
When I was growing up, Dr Dolittle wasn’t so much my hero as my role model! Just like him, I could think of nothing better than to be able to talk to the animals, walk with the animals and chatter to a chimp in chimpanzee! Much later in life, my boyhood dreams well behind me, I learned to meditate. My...
Happiness, food and The Art of Purring
How important is willpower to your happiness? And does food have anything to do with it? Most of us would agree that it requires willpower to graduate from school, learn a skill, or practice anything till you get really good at it. Self-fulfilment is unlikely to just happen spontaneously. It is more likely to arise as a side effect...
Cutting off thoughts versus suppressing them: what’s the difference?
When practising meditation our first experiences of a mind free of all agitation or dullness are usually all too brief. A fleeting glimpse, like catching sight of a rare fish beneath the surface of a river – unmistakable but elusive. For a few precious moments we may enjoy the peaceful spaciousness of mind, perhaps begin to settle into the profound...
Be better
Every day when I go online I find myself facing a barrage of emails, Facebook messages and blogs, with many of them urging me to do something. No doubt you have the same experience. Whether it’s Amazon prompting you to buy a new book, a thought leadership coach urging you to monetize your ideas, or an investment adviser telling you...
A meditation for this precious New Year
Happy 2020! Isn’t it incredible to think that you and I are among the top 0.0000001% of the world’s population? How can I make such an extraordinary pronouncement? The population to which I refer is that of all sentient beings – not just humans. To be born as one of only seven billion humans on a planet of numberless billions of...
Awakening to the true value of life – in a mortuary
A while back I had one of those ‘catching up on the last ten years’ phone calls with a friend who lives in Germany. Jacqui is amazing, amusing and vivacious, a woman of great inner and outer beauty. She had a successful modelling career in South Africa, where we met, as well as in Europe after she moved there. She is...
One New Year’s Resolution is enough!
As we approach that time of the year when New Year Resolutions are talked about, I’d like to share an insight from one of my favourite books, Willpower, Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney. To summarise, while willpower is a quality we can – and arguably should – all develop more of, on a day...
Eight things I have learned from prostate cancer
In May 2018 I underwent keyhole surgery to remove my prostate gland. The surgery followed a diagnosis of early stage prostate cancer over a year before. Three identified tumours were small, and not growing rapidly – Gleason Score 6 for those of you in the know. But the location of one showed the potential to spread. Given my relatively young...
This festive season, don’t let the urgent become the enemy of the important
This is a time of year when stress levels peak. Yes, we have parties, holidays and festivities to look forward to. But there are all those other things we need to get done before year end. Project deadlines, work assignments, and around the home perhaps, all sorts of jobs to complete in readiness for Christmas and the New Year. All...
