Recent writing
For Extinction Rebellion Buddhists: Healing Oppression – an article exploring a Buddhist approach to healing oppression For Bright Earth Buddhist Temple: Mindful Walk – a description of a recent mindfulness walk What Should I Do? – exploring how to make choices about which path to follow Is This World a Pure Land? – is it […]
Grief and Climate Change
In our Buddhist community, at the invitation of our local XR group, we dedicate one practice session each month to the living earth. In our most recent session I talked about and made a space for grief, and I’ll share some of those same thoughts here. Grief I remember a childhood holiday to Cornwall. We […]
The Importance of Being Yourself
You can hear a lot about selflessness in psychological and spiritual circles “just do what is needed for the other person” or “selflessness means putting your own feelings aside”. There is a danger in all of this that we disappear. Not in the good way that the ‘extinguishing’ of nirvana implies, but that we hide […]
The Dharma of the sliced thumb
A post shared by Kaspalita (@kaspalita) on Dec 12, 2017 at 12:51am PST It was Thursday evening. I was still recovering from a heavy cold. It had lodged itself in my chest, and although my head was clear and my voice returned I had developed a cough which a friend euphemistically called ‘productive’… I was […]
Everything can become an offering
Late afternoon on Friday. The sun had already dipped behind the hills leaving the temple and garden in shadow, but the wide Severn valley and the distant hills of the Cotswolds were lit in a dusky gold light. I glimpsed the view, a picture of stillness, through the grubby window of one of our guest […]
Paying attention to a world that is falling apart
The clouds are mostly just grey today; a flat sky that only gives up its colour and texture under close examination. I woke up at eight, to the sound of our oldest cat mewing for breakfast. I shuffled through the dark flat, fed him, and the girl cat scurrying after us, and went back to […]
Fragile and Uncertain Creatures
On the top floor of the temple is a long, high ceilinged hallway between the residents bedrooms. The carpet is a mottled beige, worn down the centre. Dim lightbulbs hang from long cords in paper lampshades. Just as you go into the hallway, look up, and you will see a stain on the ceiling and […]
Living with change
Written late spring/early summer Suzuki Roshi was once asked if anything was constant in this life. He replied with one word: change. A couple of weeks ago I watched a wave of hail moving from behind the hills, over the temple and through the valley. Directly above my office, directly above my writing desk, is […]
How accepting ‘what is’ leads to real change
Yesterday afternoon I was tired, and I was grumpy. I was upset with someone for not having behaved how I wanted them too, or how I thought I would have behaved in their situation. I worked over the situation in my mind. I was justifying my upset feelings to myself, but of course this just […]
Dogma, the Kalama Sutta, and a Bad Book Review
Over the Christmas break a book review appeared on Amazon.com that amused me. It was a review of mine and Satya’s book Just As You Are: Buddhism for Foolish Beings. It was a three star review, which I thought that was pretty generous, considering what the reviewer had to say… I’m not sure I could read this […]