Articles

The Allure of Meditation Retreats

by

Most Dharma centers these days offer people the chance to deepen their meditation practice by offering retreats, anywhere from one day to a few months in duration. For many of us, even to take one day out of our lives to attend a retreat can be difficult, but the benefits are lasting and well worth making the effort to attend.

When I first started practicing meditation, I originally started with just 10-20 minutes a day; slowly working my way up to one-hour sessions. As I continued to read and became more inspired, I began doing semi-retreats at home on the weekend. I would practice noble silence and do up to seven hours meditation on the Saturday (breaking up my sessions with 45 minutes Shamatha meditation and 15 minutes walking meditation). Then on the Sunday I would attend my local center’s Sunday morning session and come home and do more practice.

Read more

Do Animals Have Feelings and Emotions?

by

In Buddhism, it is said that all sentient beings are ones who can perceive and feel, which raises the question whether animals are conscious and experience feelings and emotions like we do. For those of us with pets, like cats or dogs, it may be easy to see that these types of animals experience similar emotions to us like happiness, sadness and even jealousy and pain. However, since most of us haven’t grown up with farm animals (the kind most likely raised for the meat industry), it’s understandable that we might not have considered whether these animals are also capable of exhibiting emotions.

Read more

Pilgrimage Registration Now Open

by

If you would like to come on pilgrimage to India and Nepal at the end of the year to see the holy sites associated with the Buddha’s life, now is the time to book. As an incentive to book early, the first six participants to pay their fully-refundable joining fee will receive a saving of $250 USD on the total cost of the trip!

We’ve created a new website for the pilgrimages which will hopefully make navigation and finding the information you need a lot easier. You can find everything you need to know at www.enthusiasticbuddhistpilgrimages.com.

Read more

Letting Go In The Moment

by

Every moment we choose to let go of our fears and expectations, it gives us the ability to simply see ‘what is’. There is no moment that is more important than the present one. And it is when our minds are open without judgment and expectation that we see the peace that naturally resides within us. When we can tap into that depth of being, over and over again, every situation becomes a dance to see how much more we can allow ourselves to let go.

Read more

How to Deal With Negative Emotions: Unraveling Our Mental Stories

by

There is a meditation technique called ‘tracing back the thought’. When we apply it to our everyday life it means that when we notice our mind has been caught up in a story we try to slowly go back through the mental events to see how it has resulted in the current chaos in our mind.

For example, the other day I was feeling generally annoyed and irritated with everyone around me. They hadn’t done anything wrong, and it wasn’t that I had gotten out of the wrong side of the bed. I sat at my computer wondering where all this frustration had come from. I thought to myself, before I got to work, I didn’t feel happy. When I was driving in my car, I didn’t feel happy. When I left home I was feeling happy. So what was I doing in the car?

Read more

Mind And Its Potential

by

Meditation is the key to developing a mind that is peaceful, compassionate and wise, but it can also unlock extra-sensory abilities that we were not previously able to experience. Some meditators who have been willing to document their experience have shared how they have gained special abilities following a period of meditation.

Read more