Buddhist Women on a Path of Spiritual Awakening
Feast of Patience
Can we not give vent to the wanting mind, not blame conditions nor allow discontentment to grow? Develop patience and persevere on the path. Know things as they are and accept them. Patience is the highest austerity. So change gears, and move away from…
Virtue Goes Full Circle
Virtue creates a force in the heart, a field of goodness, from generosity to joy to enlightenment. Bring each moment back to awareness. Once there is joy in the heart, the mind finds ease to go to its depths. Be your own doctor, self-examine,…
The Teacher is Present – Vesak Joy and Dhamma Refuge
To celebrate the Buddha’s life is to be his disciple in enlightenment. Every day becomes a day of Vesak when we emulate the Buddha’s virtues and follow his gradual training in Dhamma-Vinaya and spiritual warrior-ship. We vow to purify the mind, realize the vision…
Spiritual Athlete
Every Canadian knows Terry Fox, a teenage athlete who lost his leg to cancer, continued to train as a runner and ran across Canada with one leg before he succumbed to his illness. His mission was to raise money for cancer research so others…
The Torah and Triple Gem
An autobiographical portrait of Ayya Medhanandi’s life, from her meeting with her first teacher in India in her early twenties to her career as a nutritionist and going forth to become a Theravada Buddhist nun. She notes the striking similarities between the tenets of…
Delusion is Not the Way Out
How can we have compassion for others without falling apart? The Buddha’s path of awakening teaches us how to disarm our internal armour, to be harmless. This will be for us a true basis for following precepts and thereby developing enough inner quiet to…
On the wings of the breath
Using the breath to move into the silent space in the heart and attentively following its rhythm, the breath becomes our whole world. We let go of all objects that arise, all thought, as we stay present and aware in the simple current of…
Love Everyone or Die
We may speak of or feel that we know about death but until we truly contemplate, approach and move into death, what do we know? This is a tale about looking into the eye of a tortoise shell butterfly while it lay dying on…
Shoot Me First: Right Intention, Effort & Social Responsibility
As we follow the steps of the Eightfold Noble Path, our hatred, greed, and delusion abate. We may yet suffer, but we use our suffering to fathom the meaning of it, see its causes, and see the possibility for ending suffering. The four Noble…
Ascending the Altar
What is renunciation? Patiently we learn how to let go of the thoughts and actions that enslave us to samsara. And we begin to understand what it takes to tame the ego and cultivate greater and greater compassion in its boundless quality. Through this…
~ Dhammapada Verse 54