If we can practice a radical hospitality towards ourselves—dropping judgements and just letting ourselves be—others will see this and learn that they too can take a far more generous attitude towards themselves.

Like the gardener selecting seeds, we can pay attention to what works in our lives, and in our Dharma practice, and choose to “save” the habits, attitudes, and practices that bear the most fruit.

We’ll do anything to avoid the discomfort of not knowing. So instead, we speculate. We worry. We overthink. What if we tried not knowing—just for a day?

The first thing I noticed when joining was that here in Sweden is that there are lots of older people, in their 70s and 80s. The other notable thing is the nakedness.

Fasting has become a way of combining my epicurean nature with my equal and opposite desire to practice simplicity and renunciation! We live in a world of excess. We are undernourished and overfed. But not just with food.

David Lynch described sound as "invisible" in movies. And of course, it is, but not only to our eyes. What he meant is that while we can’t physically see sound, its impact on us is enormous, yet it often goes unnoticed.

An exciting new thread for me: working with feng shui in my home can also be a way of working with the lakshanas and vimokshas.

Take inspiration from the birds and move through life like the crane—totally relaxed, letting the qi carry you along.

Place yourself in the ‘power position’ a place that supports confidence and security. It works, I feel so much more relaxed.

What I’ve learnt from Laurie Anderson about Dharma, art and life. A first draft.

It’s as if something only has worth if it refers to something else. That’s a kind of craziness! It’s always looking elsewhere for what is actually right here.

The more I think about it, the more I’m struck by how planning has its own aesthetics. It’s like curating our time the way we’d curate any visual space.

Do we understand that felt anger often does less harm than suppressed anger? Suppressed anger becomes violence. Sadness too has its place, and when suppressed becomes depression.

Some Buddhist texts say we should be ‘guarding the gates of the senses’. But I would argue that most sense pleasure is innocent - perhaps we can even think of it as a safe refuge?

That that the day of your death is written is the kind of idea I would normally reject straight away as not only un-Buddhist but unattractive. That is until you think about it more deeply.

A realisation recently came into focus. It’s that I now see, in a way that I haven’t before, that everything that’s happened in my life, everything I’ve done, couldn’t have been any other way.

My wife went to the corner shop to pick up a few bits and came back with a gift for me, a squashed tin can. That’s odd, you might think, but not remarkable, that is till you hear the next part of the story…

I love the aesthetics of work, even desk work. It's even better with manual work. Clearing the table for baking bread, the leather apron, sprinkling flour onto the board…

Why don’t I do this more often, I thought, go to a rock concert with a crowd of pensioners?

Deep truths hidden in a goofy poem from Jack Kerouac