Zen Moments

“You watch it all, until the last sliver of golden light vanishes…”

Having taught meditation for many years, I’ve found that one of the most common questions I get asked is: “How do I get started?”
People often begin with a book and try to teach themselves. But in the beginning you don’t really know what you [...]

“Not-knowing is not easy, it’s not comfortable…”

“And what do you do?”
Back when I was 21, I was unemployed. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I hated that question.
“I’m unemployed” was the truth, but I would cringe each time I gave that answer. In those days maybe there was more of a stigma [...]

A man surprises people at a gas station and offers to pay for their gas. He selects his target cars almost at random and tells his amazed recipients: “Just do something nice for somebody else…”

“It’s cracked like this because
it’s perfectly in line with the Buddha’s teaching”

A friend of mine bought a Blackberry the other day. The new Blackberries are pretty slick – email, contacts, calendar, sat-nav, camera… He got it set up, but he couldn’t get the email or the sat-nav to work properly.
After waiting on hold and several [...]

“So – stand back and look at what it’s costing emotionally.
Forget the money for the moment…”

Having been a Buddhist monk, and now running an IT support business, I find that these two worlds sometimes overlap in surprising ways.
In running my business, I never sign contracts with people. Everything is done on trust, people come [...]

“If you’ve practised with the small things,
you’ll be able to deal with the big things.”

This one stopped me in my tracks. The Abbot said he was going to get his sleeping bag dry-cleaned, and I thought “Mine could really do with cleaning too”.
So I asked him “Could we get my sleeping bag dry-cleaned as well?”

I [...]

With a worried look on her face she asked me:
“What did I do wrong?”

This is something I wrote for a lady in Sri Lanka who decided she wanted to develop her meditation practice in daily life. She resolved to bring more mindfulness into ordinary day-to-day activities. So she set out to go shopping mindfully.
She [...]

“No thanks, I don’t need anything right now… was like shutting a door in their face…”

I learned a lot about receiving when I was a monk.
I lived as a Buddhist monk without money for 17 years – where everything I consumed (apart from water and toothpaste) actually had to be put into my hands – I [...]