It’s really worth fighting to reclaim the deepest part of our heart and its capacity to feel. None of us are inherently greed or aversion rooted. What we are missing is our connection to what is contained in the stillness. When we overcome our numbness, the quest to find meaning in life is over.

The five hindrances are the grossest parts of the mind that need to be attended to before we get properly settled or make progress towards refining the mind. So much of the work is around the refinement of character. The more tendency there is to unwholesome states of mind, the more painful it is to make progress.

The Buddha shared the teachings of insight and concentration to those people who were committed to living a virtuous life. The ego pursues different things from the Dharma than the heart. We don’t become receptive to a higher understanding that the Dharma points to until we have learned to restrain the more selfish aspects of our mind. The first part of the Buddha’s teaching is virtue.

When human consciousness is refined with kindness and respect and our hearts are pure, we are close to the divine. Our inspiration is to be close to that. But when humans get too self-absorbed, we are not moved by the divine. The general psyche is absorbed with itself and the pursuit of what it wants. We separate ourselves and cut ourselves off from the creative process. Individuality is a human obsession.

When the Buddha taught the Dharma he hoped that beings would free themselves from suffering. We swing from periods of good fortune to misfortune. When we are fortunate, there is a danger that we run our life on karmic overdraft and our merit runs out. When this happens, a life of good fortune is no longer supported. A fortunate human life is the rarest opportunity to free yourself from suffering.

How you are feeling now is a result of how you have reacted to what you have experienced in the past. The way we react is hardwired into us. It is a conditioned response. We each have a different stock of reactions that we have accumulated. If you change the way you react in the present, it will change how you will react in the future.

Giving back and breathing out can be an adventure. You have to put a significant amount of time and energy into your practice to see what you are truly capable of. Committing to a long retreat, for example, is an opportunity to change the make up of your mind in a permanent and enriching way that will serve you for the rest of your life. Burgs explains why now is the time to be a yogi.

How can I manage my life in such as a way that I feel comfortable and settled in the experiences that I am engaging in? Part of the answer is looking at taking care of yourself, being realistic and maintaining a balance at every level. Many people feel overwhelmed because they bring too much into their life – it is crowded out and there is no spaciousness. Rather than looking at how can I cope with this, look at how can I create more space?

The Buddha talked about beings that are volitional (driven by personal will) or functional (performing their function seamlessly in an awakened state). The transition from adolescence to adulthood is when we find out who we actually are by performing our function and not thinking we are special. A skilful human being moves like a stick through water and does not leave much of a trace. There are countless ways of being of service and performing our function.

The experience is what has a transformative effect in meditation. Seeing something we have not seen before can create a paradigm shift which helps us transform our suffering. Peak experiences are not the cessation of suffering. The real testament is the refinement of character which means you are not afflicted by what happens to you.

The Buddha was not interested in teaching the momentary cessation of suffering but finding a pathway to cut off at the root the habit of bringing ourselves to suffering. When he was a prince twenty-five centuries ago, he came to the conclusion that there is no happiness to be found in the pursuit of pleasure alone. After he renounced his worldly life and went forth, he also found that practicing austerity practices alone does not cut off the causes of suffering. When he became enlightened, he...

We may not have recognised it but somewhere inside us is a longing for a sense of deep connection to what we are part of. We try to do meet this through ideas but this is not the same as being totally present. We need to turn up fully to our experience rather than get lost in thinking about it all and meditation is a process of gradually bringing to an end our sense of separation.

With more mindfulness, you can see what you are bringing to this moment from the past. When you witness this without a sense of self, you see things much for how they really are rather than what you think they are. We can bring a more objective perspective and open the door to some of the charge we are carrying.

The goal of meditation is to free ourselves from suffering of the affliction we experience in our life. To see clearly what life is, we have to polish the lens that we look through. Understanding comes from insight rather than studying or intellectual reflection. The eightfold noble path leads to liberation through insight. As soon as you see what this is, you free yourself. The liberation is in the seeing. In order to see, we have to pay wise attention

What did the Buddha say was the cause of suffering? You might think that attachment is the cause of our suffering, but attachment itself is caused by ignorance. If we saw what life truly is, we would not suffer. Our ignorance is the illusion of self. When we are absorbed in what we are doing, our sense of self fades. The arising of the sense of me in the middle of my experience is what creates the sense of separation.

You don’t know what you are going to get in life – good luck or bad luck, who knows? Sometimes life goes your way and sometimes it does not. It does not matter what you get, it matters how you meet each experience with a clear mind. Burgs goes onto to discuss karma and consciousness and asks what do you know to be true? The views we cling to are highly predictable on account of the way our mind works and our conditioning. The “wisdom of the idiot” acknowledges th...

Sometimes the conditions are not present for us to be flourishing and we are either struggling or coping. The maturing of our insight ensures we can make more skilful life decisions, so that our expectations are realistic and in tune with the karmic forces that are underpinning our lives. There will be times when we are supported karmically, and times when we are challenged. If you get a sense of what is going on in the background, you can time your decisions appropriately, ...

What causes disturbances in our meditation once we have established serenity and are not throwing any more pebbles into the pond of our mind? It’s our old stock of unwholesome mental states which shake our heart base. This happens because our field of perception opens and negative mental states reveal themselves which are below the threshold of our normal awareness. We know these mental states are just below the surface but usually distract ourselves from feeling them - maintaining a mo...

Are you looking to learn to meditate or realise the path out of suffering? Your welfare in the here and now is dependent on the accumulation of merit in the past. If you are practicing to enhance your welfare for now and in the future, this is realised through virtue and how you conduct yourself. The Buddha taught the path of the causal cessation of suffering which might not be everyone’s aspirations. Whatever your aspirations, it is clear that we need to change signif...

Following on from the last episode, Burgs explores the themes of vitality, karma and stress. The quality of your mind has a very significant impact on the quality of your life – much more so than what you eat, for example. When you are meditating, it is the attitude you bring to it which can bring the most coherence and transformation. When its not going well, rather than worrying, it is an opportunity to find a strength of character that you would not normally bring to the ...