2019: Fletching the Arrow Just as a fletcher shapes an arrow, so the wise develop the heart/mind [Citta], So excitable, uncertain, and difficult to control. Dhammapada, Chapter 3: verse 33 Ever since 2014, the VIMS sangha has gathered on New Year’s morning to welcome the incoming year. We sit in silence, and afterwards we reflect…

Tranquility is an important element of the early Buddhist approach to liberating the mind from its tendency towards reactivity, and, thereby, from the habitual attitude of stressful dissatisfaction. The combination of calming the mind (tranquility) and seeing clearly the nature of our own subjective experience of the world, inside and outside, is both the fruit…

Resiliency: The Maturing of Mindfulness Breathing In and Breathing Out, I stop the war.  Many years ago––probably in the early 1990s––I heard a talk by the now-deceased Dharma teacher Stephen Levine in which he spoke of something that had happened at a workshop he taught at the Omega Institute the year before. In the workshop…

“What Motivated You ?” “It is just like a person who is on an extended journey along a long road. Becoming sick halfway [or perhaps he has had an accident], he is exhausted and suffering extremely. He is alone and without a companion . . . .  Suppose a person comes and, standing to one…

Ajahn Jayanto, the abbot of the Temple Forest Monastery in Temple, New Hampshire, came to teach at VIMS for the seventh consecutive year this August. When he first came to visit us, in the fall of 2013, he was not an abbot, and there was no Temple Forest Monastery. The thought of a monastery was…

“Peace is all around us, in our hearts, in the world. It is not just a matter of faith; it is a matter of practice.” –– Thich Nhat Hanh Last month I wrote about faith, stating that I have confidence in the efficacy of certain aspects of the Dharma teachings––especially, though not only, in compassion:…