Rope Burn

Your suffering is directly linked to the fact that you think cars are real. In this episode we will deconstruct a car in search of its inherent "car-ness". For anyone who is able to successfully complete that thought experiment, the latter portion of the episode will walk through a deconstruction of what we think of as our "self" / "ego" / "personality". The big promise I make here is that the fai...

Making decisions based on desire is, at best, only going to work in our favour part of the time. So how can we do what's best for us, and for others, more consistently?

If you've ever been curious about psychedelic states of mind, but have been hesitant to try anything because you're afraid of losing control, psychedelic breathwork techniques might be the perfect alternative. With psychedelic breathing, deep states of awakened consciousness can come online and we glimpse profound "big picture" insights about our own lives. It's important to notice that this type...

In developing the conditions for our enlightenment, it helps to have both offensive and defensive strategies. Our offensive approach is to pay attention at all times. Our defensive strategy is to be on the alert for when we are living from a state of autopilot. When we notice that this is the case, we can flip back into a state of paying attention.

I just stumbled across some really critical information around the direct path to enlightenment. One must simply pay attention at all times. But how can I possibly absorb all of it, at once, forever, for the rest of my life? Would I even want to it? Sounds exhausting. One thing that can alleviate some of that upfront resistance is the realization that there's no need to actually capture all of it....

True freedom is accepting things, exactly as they are, even as we work to improve our situation. Problems don't exist; they're simply a failure to accept things as they actually are.

There is a feeling that we all experience, on a daily basis, that has enormous potential for allowing us to taste a deep sense of personal completeness. That feeling is restlessness. How does that make any sense? How can restlessness be something that through which we're able to discover a deep sense of well-being, and a profound feeling that we are all ready complete, exactly as we are? Restlessn...

Meditation can produce stretches of radio silence where the thinking process stops. This can be startling, and for me it was even accompanied by some fear. But as we learn to trust this silence, there is the potential for our identification with thoughts to release. And if meditation is about anything, it's about letting go.

Mu is exactly the way everything already is. It is becoming transparent, yielding to, and just being what is here, now. Simultaneously, there is a falling into the spell of thought. In those moments, the thought is all there is. And so I am the thought. But when I notice I'm caught up in the spell of thinking, which often itself is more thinking, albeit less identified. Can mu be entered willfully...

Like the process of breathing, thinking is, at best, only somewhat controllable. Most of the time, the thinking mind is on autopilot. If we aren't our thoughts, we are free to relate to thinking as an impersonal process. This new orientation opens up new tools for practice, and creates the space needed to work skillfully even when our thoughts feel out of control.

Why is it important to slow down and do things as mindfully and as deliberately as possible with careful, attention, paid to whatever it is that we're spending our time doing - however mundane In that task might be? The comparison that I found very helpful actually is drawn from bodybuilding. When you look at the distinction between training for power and training for muscular hypertrophy and grow...

What comes to mind when you hear the word contentment? Is that a feeling that you are very familiar with? Are we able to immediately pinpoint in ourselves? What if we were already feeling this every day, and just haven't been noticing?

The desire to be happy is one of the most fundamental urges for us all. And yet, the ways we go about becoming happy tend not to last. Why is this? If we take a closer look, it becomes clear that the happiness checklist we create has the unintended consequence of also making us unhappy. So what can be done about it? It turns out that there are ways of lowering our dependancy upon external conditio...