Buddhist Psychological Insights for Daily Living
Select Teachings By Topic
- Change & Uncertainty
- Depression
- Difficult Emotions
- Disappointment & Loss
- Love & Relationships
- Self-Soothing Practices
- Skillful Living
- Trauma & Psychological Wounds
Do We Dare To Create A Blank Page?
We have a choice not to be defined by the past. We have a choice how we relate to this moment, this new chapter, here and now.
Fear and Uncertainty
Recognizing the truth of anicca (that everything is impermanent) can be helpful in coping with fear. When fear arises we can self-soothe through relaxation and surrender.
Living with Disappointment
In becoming an adult you learned how to cope with disappointment, or else you wouldn’t be able to function at all. Yet, the conundrum remains: If you’ve learned to live with disappointments, then why does it still take so much of your energy to cope?
Lost in Doubt?
Last year while teaching a month-long silent meditation retreat with several other vipassana teachers, we were faced with what to do about a yogi who was not fully participating. He wasn’t showing up for the sittings or attending the dharma talks, and he was avoiding
Making Major Life Changes
If you watch closely, you may discover that your own life is part of this seasonal pattern of endings and beginnings. In early fall, you externally focus on finishing up tasks with a burst of energy, followed by delving into your internal experience as the days get shorter and the darkness lasts longer.
Starting Over
As a meditation teacher, I’m often solicited for advice by students who are seeking to change their lives in some way. They may want to alter an aspect of their behavior or their emotional life, or improve their relations with others. They almost always report
Are You Willing to Be Changed?
Opening to the possibility of change is essential to your psychological development, but like many people you may be resistant to being changed in a profound way. However, you can learn to be more skillful when it comes to change by applying mindfulness.
Decision Time
The Buddha taught that mental suffering arises out of ignorance. By “ignorance” he meant the misperceptions and delusions that your mind has about its own nature. Thus, the way to free the mind
Freedom from Fear
Living in a fear-based culture inevitably affects your state of mind and the decisions you make. As a citizen you may become more compliant, more willing to surrender your rights for vague promises of safety. As an employee you are less demanding, less willing to take risks.
Managing Fatigue with Mindfulness
Most of us dislike being fatigued and aren’t fully open to experiencing it. However, when we practice vipassana, we use mindfulness to see the dukkha (suffering) in all of our experiences; therefore, we can treat fatigue as one more experience that can be known.
The Pursuit of Happiness
When you organize and measure your life by how well you follow your intentions instead of getting what you desire, your moments of happiness are enhanced and your difficult moments are more bearable.
Beyond Happiness
in the four noble truths, the buddha focused primarily on suffering as a gateway to liberation. but he also taught that mindfulness of happiness can provide the same liberating insights as suffering.
Freedom from Fear
Living in a fear-based culture inevitably affects your state of mind and the decisions you make. As a citizen you may become more compliant, more willing to surrender your rights for vague promises of safety. As an employee you are less demanding, less willing to take risks.
Lost in Doubt?
Last year while teaching a month-long silent meditation retreat with several other vipassana teachers, we were faced with what to do about a yogi who was not fully participating. He wasn’t showing up for the sittings or attending the dharma talks, and he was avoiding
Working Mindfully with Anger
You can feel anger toward another or yourself. Your anger can be justified or unjustified. If your anger is justified, you’ve got two possibilities: You can either do something about it, or you can’t. Therefore, there’s no cause for melodrama, which simply
Knowing Regret
Regret can be triggered by something you did or didn’t do, something another person did or didn’t do, or some combination of these. You may be clinging to memories of something bad that happened to you or to regret over some action you took. Bad memories or deep sorrow
Getting Past Fear
All things are constantly changing, even what is most precious to you. You know that you and those you love will die, but you don’t know when or how. This is the existential dilemma of life, and the price of being a conscious human being. It is simply the way life is constructed.
Healing Your Mother (or Father) Wound
If you have unresolved feelings about your mother (or father), making them part of your mindfulness practice can transform what has been a hindrance in your life into a teacher.
Forgiving the Unforgivable
Forgiveness can be understood as a spiritual practice and has been taught as such by Jesus, the Buddha, and many other spiritual teachers. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines forgiveness in this manner: “To cease to feel resentment against on account of a
The Dharma of Discouragement
Discouragement from your past and imaginings about how bad the future will be drain your energy and cause you to fail. When you embrace starting over as a practice, you focus instead on what you are doing right now and what you need to do or are failing to do.
Good Fortune, Bad Fortune
In very trying circumstances remembering your intention to not cause suffering and remembering your “don’t know mind” can lead to cessation of suffering.
Living with Disappointment
In becoming an adult you learned how to cope with disappointment, or else you wouldn’t be able to function at all. Yet, the conundrum remains: If you’ve learned to live with disappointments, then why does it still take so much of your energy to cope?
Releasing the Past through Investigation
When you respond to difficulty as if it is a moment of dharma, it frees you from suffering.
Beyond Happiness
in the four noble truths, the buddha focused primarily on suffering as a gateway to liberation. but he also taught that mindfulness of happiness can provide the same liberating insights as suffering.
Forgiving the Unforgivable
Forgiveness can be understood as a spiritual practice and has been taught as such by Jesus, the Buddha, and many other spiritual teachers. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines forgiveness in this manner: “To cease to feel resentment against on account of a
Living with Disappointment
In becoming an adult you learned how to cope with disappointment, or else you wouldn’t be able to function at all. Yet, the conundrum remains: If you’ve learned to live with disappointments, then why does it still take so much of your energy to cope?
Opening to Love
Every Sunday evening the Turtle Island Yoga Studio in San Rafael, California, is transformed into a vipassana meditation hall. A large silk painting of the Buddha, which I commissioned from a street artist in New Delhi for just this purpose, hangs on the front wall, and all the yoga mats are laid out around
Setting Personal Boundaries
Sophie, a professional woman in her mid-30s and a member of my weekly mindfulness meditation class, repeatedly feels taken advantage of. After listening to her describe a painful episode in which a friend had acted inappropriately
The Yoga of Relationship
I sat silently as the woman self-consciously settled herself onto the couch in my office. She was in her 30s, married, well established in her profession, and a sincere student of the dharma. She looked up after a few moments of reflection, smiled nervously, and said,
The Challenges & Rewards of Commitment
In order to move beyond your fear and fully commit to something—whether it’s your spiritual practice, a relationship, or your career—you must first evaluate what is worthy of your commitment. This is where
Healing Your Mother (or Father) Wound
If you have unresolved feelings about your mother (or father), making them part of your mindfulness practice can transform what has been a hindrance in your life into a teacher.
The Dharma of Discouragement
Discouragement from your past and imaginings about how bad the future will be drain your energy and cause you to fail. When you embrace starting over as a practice, you focus instead on what you are doing right now and what you need to do or are failing to do.
Finding Equanimity in Meditation
Practice keeping the mind balanced when physical sensations and sounds arise during meditation. The mind can stay balanced even during the unexpected.
Compassion Practice
Karuna, or compassion, is a state of mind/heart that can be cultivated as a practice. Compassion is an intuitive response to someone else’s suffering, or your own.
Self-Soothing and the Dharma
Self-soothing begins with softening into your experience and then applying mindfulness to recognize that “this moment is like this.” From within the spaciousness that this softening creates, you can start to investigate the experience and gain access to insight.
Fully Arriving In The Here And Now Meditation
This is a guided meditation that can help you stay in the present, here and now. Here, now, not before, not after. There is no presence, no agency in the past. It’s a memory of something gone, no longer present.
The Fruits of Forgiveness
The primary beneficiary of forgiveness practice is you. Read the following article and listen to the suggested audio dharma talk, and then deepen your understanding of the teachings by contemplating the reflections provided below.
Freedom from Fear
Living in a fear-based culture inevitably affects your state of mind and the decisions you make. As a citizen you may become more compliant, more willing to surrender your rights for vague promises of safety. As an employee you are less demanding, less willing to take risks.
Managing Fatigue with Mindfulness
Most of us dislike being fatigued and aren’t fully open to experiencing it. However, when we practice vipassana, we use mindfulness to see the dukkha (suffering) in all of our experiences; therefore, we can treat fatigue as one more experience that can be known.
Opening to Love
Every Sunday evening the Turtle Island Yoga Studio in San Rafael, California, is transformed into a vipassana meditation hall. A large silk painting of the Buddha, which I commissioned from a street artist in New Delhi for just this purpose, hangs on the front wall, and all the yoga mats are laid out around
Reconcilable Differences
MY MIND FILLS WITH ANGER each time I hear him speak,” one of my students reports of his response to a political leader. “I find myself wishing ill will toward them all,” another says with a pained voice, ashamed of her own reactions to politicians.
Self-Soothing during Difficult Times
We’ve all experienced how unsettling and uncertain life can be and how easily we can be knocked off center at any moment. When we’re not in balance, we can become defined by whatever’s happening and get caught in what I call “reactive mind.”
Starting Over
As a meditation teacher, I’m often solicited for advice by students who are seeking to change their lives in some way. They may want to alter an aspect of their behavior or their emotional life, or improve their relations with others. They almost always report
Taking in the Good Meditation
When you are experiencing difficulty in some aspect of your life that is clouding your mind and causing you to contract, practicing this meditation can help soothe your suffering and clarify your thinking.
Healing Your Mother (or Father) Wound
If you have unresolved feelings about your mother (or father), making them part of your mindfulness practice can transform what has been a hindrance in your life into a teacher.
Forgiving the Unforgivable
Forgiveness can be understood as a spiritual practice and has been taught as such by Jesus, the Buddha, and many other spiritual teachers. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines forgiveness in this manner: “To cease to feel resentment against on account of a
Loving-Kindness (or Metta) Practice
In loving-kindness practice, you repeat well-being phrases for yourself and then for your loved ones, friends, teachers, strangers, enemies, and finally all sentient beings.
Knowing What’s Really Happening: Experience vs. Interpretation
A crucial skill for minimizing emotional chaos and sustaining clarity in your life is the ability to distinguish between your experience and your interpretation of your experience.
The Dharma of Discouragement
Discouragement from your past and imaginings about how bad the future will be drain your energy and cause you to fail. When you embrace starting over as a practice, you focus instead on what you are doing right now and what you need to do or are failing to do.
Good Fortune, Bad Fortune
In very trying circumstances remembering your intention to not cause suffering and remembering your “don’t know mind” can lead to cessation of suffering.
Mindfulness: Fully Aware in the Moment
Mindfulness enables you to go beneath the surface level of moment-to-moment life experience, which is clouded with emotions, to clearly see the truth of what is happening.
How Preferences Prejudice Your Perceptions
Look around you. What do you notice? There are endless things in both your external and internal environment that you could notice. Given that you can’t possibly notice everything, why do you notice what you do? What you perceive from among all
Balancing Priorities
“The highest compassion, the only true act of compassion, is to point a person to their own liberation.” These are the words of one of my spiritual teachers in response to a question I had asked them about applying the dharma in daily life. I asked the question because
Cultivating Clear Comprehension
Try being mindful of how little distinction you make between caring about something or somebody and being attached to that thing or person. The Buddha taught that one of the fundamental characteristics of the universe is anicca, meaning
Do the Right Thing
Doing the right thing when it’s difficult has a cumulative effect over time because you let loose, at least in that moment, of the attachment to your own well-being, and you discover, “I survived that one!” It also increases the possibility of your doing the right thing again in the future.
Maintaining Mindfulness in Daily Life
Instead of staying mindful of whatever is happening in the moment, we immediately begin to interpret our experience and create a story based on past associations and attitudes we have about ourselves and others. However, our interpretation is
Making Major Life Changes
If you watch closely, you may discover that your own life is part of this seasonal pattern of endings and beginnings. In early fall, you externally focus on finishing up tasks with a burst of energy, followed by delving into your internal experience as the days get shorter and the darkness lasts longer.
Beyond Happiness
in the four noble truths, the buddha focused primarily on suffering as a gateway to liberation. but he also taught that mindfulness of happiness can provide the same liberating insights as suffering.
Decision Time
The Buddha taught that mental suffering arises out of ignorance. By “ignorance” he meant the misperceptions and delusions that your mind has about its own nature. Thus, the way to free the mind
The Three Wholesome Exchanges of the Heart
Have you ever felt the need to be called forth by someone or something that will lead you to step forward and meet the challenges that prevent you from embodying your largest capacities?
Forgiving the Unforgivable
Forgiveness can be understood as a spiritual practice and has been taught as such by Jesus, the Buddha, and many other spiritual teachers. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines forgiveness in this manner: “To cease to feel resentment against on account of a
Opening to Love
Every Sunday evening the Turtle Island Yoga Studio in San Rafael, California, is transformed into a vipassana meditation hall. A large silk painting of the Buddha, which I commissioned from a street artist in New Delhi for just this purpose, hangs on the front wall, and all the yoga mats are laid out around
Practicing Nonviolence Toward Self
Some years ago people used to wear a T-shirt printed with the slogan, “Life is difficult, and then you die.” I once asked a group of people at a yoga retreat what they thought when they read those words. One person found it funny; a way to laugh at
Self-Soothing during Difficult Times
We’ve all experienced how unsettling and uncertain life can be and how easily we can be knocked off center at any moment. When we’re not in balance, we can become defined by whatever’s happening and get caught in what I call “reactive mind.”
Surrendering to Suffering
Most people confronted by an assailant with a knife will try to avoid being cut out of fear. But in trying to avoid the cut, they make poor decisions, expose vital parts, and take actions that are ineffective. Not Prema- she grabbed the knife’s blade.
Healing Your Mother (or Father) Wound
If you have unresolved feelings about your mother (or father), making them part of your mindfulness practice can transform what has been a hindrance in your life into a teacher.