The Art of Mind Training: Five Powers
On March 22, 2011
Last Friday Ven. Choden Rinpoche gave a teaching on the Five Powers of the Mind to about 140 people at VI. I thought to provide some background information and a summary to this topic in this post.
The list of five powers comes from a famous text on mind-training (Tib. lo-jong) called 7-Point Mind Training [...]
Meditation Tip: Daydreaming can be meditation
On March 18, 2011
It has been a busy week at VI, with Choden Rinpoche’s visit. Still, there is time for another short reflection on our meditation practice, and a very common one, indeed.
Daydreaming during our meditation is a perfectly natural activity of our human mind. We engage in such dreaming on various occasions in the [...]
Cooking and Dharma
On March 9, 2011
Maybe you might wonder about the title of this blog. What has Dharma got to do with slow cooking? In actual fact, there are many parallels between cooking and practising Dharma. At least, that is how I see it. This blog title is inspired by a documentary that I saw a year ago about the [...]
Intention: The Mover of our Mind
On March 7, 2011
What causes our mind to move and engage one object after another, or one action after another? According to the Abhidharma teachings, it is the mental factor of intention or volition.
Intention rouses the mind and moves it along with all other concomitant factors towards an object. A classic example is that of iron [...]
Dependent Origination — A House of Cards
On March 3, 2011
What can we learn about dependent origination from a house of cards? Well, most of us would be able to figure out that a house of cards is clearly dependent on the individual cards, arranged and stacked in a specific way.
The important question to ponder is: how does this house of cards itself [...]
Meditation tip: Our mind is only stories
On March 2, 2011
Sometimes it takes an outrageous statement to shock us out of our old habits and make us take another look at familiar things and experiences.
I came across this one-liner while reading the biography of a contemporary Theravada teacher, Dipa Ma. She remarked that our mind is only stories in response to a student’s observation [...]
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