The Just Meditation Blog
When I first started meditating, nearly 30 years ago, I was travelling in India and staying in Ashrams, where I attended yoga classes and regular meditation sessions. I was taught in quite a traditional way, with a strong focus on ascetic discipline and instruction in the religious and...
As well as being a meditation teacher, I am also a priest. In this interview, which was never published, I answer a series of questions about the spiritual path, and my own sense of calling.
What does it mean to seek God?
To seek God is to seek that which is ultimately real and true. And it...
I've been wondering whether to start a Just Meditation podcast, as another way of promoting the learning and practice of meditation, alongside the Just Meditation Blog.
Over the years, I've been a guest on other people's podcasts, and it does seem to be a good medium for talking in greater...
Suddenly, in about 2014, everyone was talking about mindfulness. Although derived from Buddhist meditation practices, mindfulness achieved such unprecedented levels of mainstream popularity that many people may not even be aware of its Buddhist origins. The story of how this came about is,...
It is often said that we live in a society in which everyone is ‘searching for something.’ More specifically, they are searching, we are to infer, for some kind of ‘spiritual’ fulfilment. Sometimes my naturally sceptical disposition makes me think this is just one of those...
In 1994-95 I spent six months living with a small group of Thai Buddhist monks in a forest just north of Aukland, New Zealand. It was, in so many wonderful ways, one of the happiest and most liberating periods of my life, and I wrote about it in my book ‘Tantalus and the Pelican’ (an...
Sunna means ‘empty’ in Pali – the language of early Buddhism – and if it wasn’t for the sign at the top of the drive, one could have been forgiven for thinking that the aptly named ‘Sunnataram Forest Monastery’ was nothing but an empty field on the...
