Author: Kaspa
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Learning to stay sane around people
After a very peopled few days it is quiet in the temple today. It is lunchtime, and the only other person I have seen waved at me from a top floor window, whilst I was in the garden, before disappearing again. Satya got up at 5:30am this morning and went to a half-day yoga retreat at a…
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Incommunicado
I have not deliberately been out of touch. I have not deliberately sent you to Coventry. I have not had my hands tied behind my back since December, but neither have I written anything here since then. Next Thursday will be our six month anniversary of moving into the Temple, and in that time my…
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Foolish Beings in a Beautiful Land
There is a thin pink streak of light in the eastern sky. The sun is well over the horizon and that last thread of colour tells me what a glorious sunrise I would have seen if I had been up a little earlier. The valley is heavy with mist; a few hilltops and the tips…
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the end of stress – how to relax
This morning I was supposed to be giving a talk on how to relax. I had the flowchart of the talk I had prepared earlier in the week in one hand (‘flowchart’ is the grand name I gave my few scribbles on a page) and a cup of tea in the other. I watched as…
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more brushes with death
Yesterday morning as I was getting into the car, a harried looking nurse ran down our garden path, opened our door and called into the house. A few moments later I heard her apologising to Satya for getting the wrong address. By the time I had started the engine she was back in her own car and…
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lessons from breakdancing
The bass rolled across the dance floor and into my chest. I could feel it through the floor, and the wall behind me. The dance floor was surrounded by young people. We were at the festival of colours in Birmingham; a celebration of street art. We were in a small bar in the middle of…
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Mindfulness practice is not a magic wand
Mindfulness practice, like psychotherapy, is a long term solution. Mindfulness based programmes have been in this press a lot this year. They make great claims to solve many of the problems we face in our lives. My own mindfulness practice has given me great gifts but the journey is not always a smooth one. The…
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brushes with death
In medieval Japan one of the main reasons for practicing Pureland Buddhism was to have a good death. When I’m writing leaflets or emails about the Pureland Buddhist group I run here in Malvern I don’t mention death at all. Most of the people who come through the door of the shrine room aren’t looking for…
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back home…
…and everything seems translucent. We think of our worlds as solid, but spending a week in a completely different culture reminds me of how provisional all of this is. The things we lean on are ghosts that we take to be real.